These were moved for approval by Paul Hatton.
 

None.
 

John Blair-Fish welcomed everyone to the AGM and gave a brief report on the activities of the past year. After discussion at the last AGM and at various committee meetings over the year, it has been decided that the User Group should concentrate its activities on a new web site and discussion mailing lists for all AVS products. The mailing list has been available for 5 months at avs-users@mailbase.ac.uk, which is open to all users, not just Academic licencees. He reported that the new web site is still being worked on, and that the old site at Exeter is still available at http://www.ex.ac.uk/uauug/

Due to surplus funds, no membership fees have been collected for the last year. New users should simply give their details to the current Treasurer, Gina Woodward. A new membership form will be available on the new web site at a later date.

The User Group is still trying hard to encourage more interest from all users and particularly the commercial sector. He asked that if any non-academic users would like to join the commitee and be involved in the User Group, they should make themselves known to him.

Discussion of future events was moved to AOB.
 

The Treasurer could not be present at the AGM but sent a full report and accounts for the last financial year, 1/4/1998 to 31/3/1999.

Capital has risen from £13,711.39 to £16,692.21, mainly accounted for by they transfer of funds from the UK AVS User Group to the joint user group account.

Interest of £643.77 was received form the deposit account. A late payment of fees for the 1997 Birmingham Conference of £720.00 and a small profit of £259.35 from the 1998 Birmingham Conference.

The 4th Technical Briefing day was held in May and was subsidised by £329.88 from User Group funds. Other expenditure was £53.10 from the Gsharp Working Party and Committee expenses of £469.08 (a little higher than normal due to a decision to pay travel expenses for an extra-ordinary committee meeting to discuss the future directions of the User Group.

Existing capital is sufficient to fund all current activities, and so there is no need to charge for membership of the User Group. However, the committee reserve the right to resume charging a subscription fee at some time in the future, should circumstances dictate.
 

All members of the Executive Committee said they would be happy to stand for re-election except no reply was recieved from Yien Kwok. Mary McDerby said she would check whether Yien wished to formally stand down. This left two vacancies. Stuart Merrylees from Robertson Research was prepared to stand, proposed Arline Wilson, seconded Paul Hatton, and Mary McDerby from Manchester Computing was also perpared to stand, proposed John Blair-Fish, seconded Ralph Raby. There were no further proposals, and all were elected unopposed to serve on the Executive Committee of the User Group for the next year.
 

Much discussion of the form and content of Technical Briefing Days was held. Stuart Merrylees asked if there was any interest in agX programming for developers, even though the feeling was that the number of these was still declining. Steve Morgan (Liverpool) asked if there might be a TBD on OpenViz and Visual Basic.

Another area was that of OpenGL which opened up many possible threads; programming, software support, hardware support etc.

There did not seem to be any enthusiasm for a TBD on 15 December 1999.

A straw poll revealed interest in:

The meeting agreed to coming back to Birmingham again. Paul Hatton will be the local organiser, and the dates wil be announced when the availability of the meeting rooms and accommodation can be confirmed for some date around this time of year.

The next AGM will be held at the User Group Annual Meeting, Birmingham, 2000.