TransportationToastmasters new year celebration

Last month we had a great dinner celebration to induct and welcome the new board of my Toastmasters club, celebrate the past years achievements, and have a good social time. I've been a member of Transportation Toastmasters for many years, and am sort of the granddaddy -- to guide the newer members as well as help out with any kind of special events. I took on the project to organize this party. First order of business was to get a consensus of the venue, date and time. It just happens that I had read some articles on voting theory and voting models in different countries. Most voting is a simple ballot where you pick a single choice among many. It would great if our constitution was changed to explore these other options where we can pick multiple choices, rank them or use a weighting system - I believe that gives us much better ways to achieve a collective consensus. (I must admit though, that this is way low on a scale of what is wrong with our democracy)

Anyways, I thought I would try this out something cool. I first asked people to make suggestions for restaurants, and dates. After considering all factors, we narrowed it down to three day window, and choice of 10 restaurants. I thought of writing a quick asp.net application to get online surveys, but thought to first browse around the web to see if I could use something that is already there. SurveyMonkey happens to be an asp.net app and it had what I needed. I made it so that instead of people just picking on one restaurant, can put points of several ones that they like. There were given upto 100 points. The same applied to the date selection. At the end I added up the points to come with the consensus. You can also download the data to a spreadsheet and do more data manipulation (such as give a multiplier factor for people who are bringing guests), group totals, graphs, etc.

The survey was a great success, and the members loved the idea. It was also very convenient - a simple 5 question online form. Best of all this service is free.

We had a wonderful dinner celebration. We settled on Pizza House in East Lansing which has a room in the back. We invited our Division governor Peg McComb-Elowski and some former but long time members. It was good to see Vanessa Tran and catch up with her. We ran into Jane Aldrich, a long time WLNS news anchor, who was our special guest speaker just two weeks ago. We actually had a few more people than my what I had reserved for - but Pizza House was gracious to add more tables to seat everyone together.