- Ms. Bamberger presented the agenda after she determined we had a quorum (attached). Ms. Bamberger began the meeting by updating us on the national ASME teleconference she attended on the 11th and then Mahantesh presented the District D Calendar (attached).

Ms. Bamberger asked if anyone was going to the annual meeting and to let here know so that the district D members can coordinate to meet at that event. A few members that will be going include Ms. Bamberger, Mahantesh Hiremath, Dennis Armstrong, Scott Burr, There was additional discussion regarding the content of this meeting as not being a training like LTC but more of a formal meeting.

Ms. Bamberger brought up another issue on the calendar for March 26, 2011 to hear about the re-designation of the Fresno scraper and one attendee gave a bit of background information but only a little more detail than the calendar description itself.

There was some discussion regarding the SDC conferences and that some of the sections gained external sponsorships. One section got one in the amount of $5000 from one company. They also mentioned a few things that were occurring with the funding and possibly a money reimbursement but this detail could have been misinterpreted by myself.

Dennis Armstrong then directed us through the web-trail ASME.org - Groups (top) - Volunteer resources (left) - Unit forms and instructions (mid page) - Section merit funding program form, District A to F to show us the merit funding form. He said that there were several little changes and one big change:
- Every section gets a handicap of 15 points to start
- The primary way of funding is from one pot but additional funds come from donations by members during their membership renewal which the sections should have received or it is held in a trust with the district.
- He stressed the importance of keeping an updated website shown in Item 1 of the form where the grade is multiplied by the weight of 3.
- For item 2 there is something new which is the submittal of an after activity report for the event to count which he says takes about 2 minutes to fill out online which I did not catch where this link was.
- For item 3 he mentioned there was a sponsorship of a PE refresher course. He expanded that the sections achieved high scores in this section and the setup didn't allow the reviewers to see the mid level people which might need help. He also mentioned on a side note that the Oregon section had a person come in and do a geometric dimensioning and tolerancing course for a day.
- For item 4 there was a new thing to support the local government body with engineering related topics.
- For item 5 he didn't provide much new information.
- There was also a definition section added to the form.
- He also mentioned that the new highest score is 125 but there was someone who evaluated the form and didn't see that 125 was possible and Dennis agreed so I guess we'll just have to look over the form to see the maximum score.

He mentioned that he thought it was good practice to review the scoring at the beginning of the year and schedule your year around the schedule in the beginning which prevents last minute events and filling out of the form.

Ms. Bamberger asked if the chair could cc the district with their submitted form.

Ms. Bamberger then moved to the round table discussion for which I mentioned several of the items the section was doing (welding course, habitat for humanity, pumps for Haiti, tours, early career forum lunches, annual banquet, magazine distribution) doing but probably missed some too. Others also mentioned they were doing career forums and they are bringing their website up to date (which I forgot to mention). There was also a special note on doing webinars which actually create what they considered a fair amount of money (~$2500) and Scott Burr may present some ground rules next month.