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michaeld

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Drafted answers to several answering team emails ready for review, began drafting a section in The Definition Debate article in the wiki about the current definition debate. Once the first draft is more refined, I'll be ready to post it in the new wiki thread for more input before posting it to the wiki.

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Late response again sorry. It's all WorldPride for me (well apart from the usual answering media and speaker requests, and giving a talk on Tuesday at a bank!)

 

We're just about on course. Have insurance set and ready to be booked. Have many of the march materials either ready to go or nearly ready. A huge thank you to Kelico for help with that. They also helped us convert our logo into vector format, which allows us to appear on the main worldpride website - I'll send a link when I have it. Have translators in place - still some details to be worked out. Have a first draft of the timetable, which is being finalised next week. Have contacted people about their travel plans, accessibility arrangements and (some) invitations to panel - though some are still to come. Also working out how the conference will be videoed (and maybe even livestreamed - not sure we can do that yet though). And a load more stuff I forgot (though I've had help with all these things - you know who you are!) This is going to continue to be my life (outside work) for the next 3 weeks.....

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  • 2 months later...

Well ... seems we're way behind with this update. Apologies for that.

 

The whole of June was taken up with WP for me. Organising the conference. And preparing materials for the march. For the latter I need to thank Kelico especially for all the work they did.l And our Spanish friends for helping translate our leaflets. Organising the conferene took most of the rest of my time - again I had help of course! I hope we can put up vids from the conference soon.

 

I also gave a talk at the WorldPride Human Rights conference - aka the WorldPride Summit - in Madrid, along with Pablo, a Spanish activist, and a Spanish psychologist ally. The summit declaration is well worth reading as it mentions asexuality explicitly!

 

I also took part in the Orgullo Critico march in Spain. And of course the WorldPride march. And a week later the Pride London march (thanks skycaptain for organising that!)

 

Since then I've been trying to get back into UK activism, which I've neglected for too long. I had another meeting with the Office of National Statistics about their Gender and Sexual Id question. (Also I arranged for a non-binary activist to attend one of their meetings while I was in Spain.) The upshot is that the sexual id question in the 2021 UK census will not include asexuality (sadly) but will include a write-in option. I think our efforts in part led to the latter outcome instead of a simple "other" tick box. Not sure how I feel about that. But maybe we can gather some data about UK asexuality. IT will require people actually taking the initiative to write the word asexual, so I would have much preferred a tick box as some may not even know the term. But oh well.

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  • 2 months later...

Well this unfortunately seems to have become the bimonthly bulletin in my case (if that) and we need to change that. We are getting a lot of new members soon and I feel getting this out once a month should be the expectation.

 

The truth is, I've been last active since the WorldPride surge. This was a big undertaking that took a lot out of me, but as I've said before the PT position is one where you can work very hard at times and then drift along for other periods. That being said, I've kept the media and speaker requests we're getting ticking over. There are a number of student projects that requested interviews, as well as mainstream media. Most notably on the latter, I connected up one of the new PT, Sea-Lemon, for an interview on Scottish national radio last week. And there's more to come! You'll be seeing more details shortly, but brief: Sea-Lemon is appearing again on Monday on radio. And we should have a piece on the BBC site to mark AAW! I'm a little nervous about this one as my relatives read the BBC site. I'm out to them but it's still awkward!

 

We also have possible representation on a play put on by UCL next week on female sexuality - we found them an ace panelist for the discussion afterwards. I'm afraid though, we don't have confirmation it's actually going ahead so I'm loathe to post details at the moment. If you are interested please PM me.

 

Moving forward from WorldPride and now AAW, I wish to concentrate more on the UK as already mentioned. I'll be starting a project on this at the end of AAW so watch this space. :P

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  • 3 months later...

Resource and Education Director Update: My first project in this role will be to update the FAQ on the main page. I'm currently in the process of reviewing existing content. Drafts of the updated FAQ will be presented to PT, and the plan is to implement them once PT reaches a consensus. The length of time this may take is unknown at this point, but when this is put into effect it will be announced to the community.

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Quiet month for me: usual stream of media requests, some of which look promising. There is a possible BBC documentary about dating; the UK media team has stepped up here and we have a few volunteers. I also had a request from a writer of a new book on asexuality; they now have several interview subjects. I haven't made progress with the UK project I wanted to get going this year: I've been too busy with work. But hopefully now...

 

I say this periodically but if you'd like to join the media team, please PM me...

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  • 6 months later...
On 1/28/2018 at 1:47 PM, Snao Cone said:

Resource and Education Director Update: My first project in this role will be to update the FAQ on the main page. I'm currently in the process of reviewing existing content. Drafts of the updated FAQ will be presented to PT, and the plan is to implement them once PT reaches a consensus. The length of time this may take is unknown at this point, but when this is put into effect it will be announced to the community.

Update on this update: I've now updated the FAQ with fresh answers, links to more current information, some reworded questions, some added questions, and a gif of a car falling down a cliff. Huge thanks to the PT and other AVENites who helped, including @Homer @TheAP @kelico @OptimisticPessimist and @Puck. If you spot any errors or have any issues or suggestions regarding these FAQ, please feel free to PM me.

 

https://www.asexuality.org/?q=overview.html

https://www.asexuality.org/?q=general.html

https://www.asexuality.org/?q=family.html

https://www.asexuality.org/?q=relationship.html

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^ Snao is amazing!

 

I've forgotten about this thread. I might as well update. : )

 

I, along with my mini social media team of @OptimisticPessimist, @Kyon., @SkyWorld, and @CosineTheCat have been keeping up the AVEN Facebook. Instead of once every 3 days, or sometimes even once a week, we've been scheduling posts for once every 2 days, and sometimes we will post more in between. The AVEN Twitter page is 99% handled by OP now because that's her forte, and I am so amazed at her skills with it. I'm so grateful! So when you're getting great replies or retweets there, it is most likely her. I've been checking and reblogging posts on the Tumblr as well as posting important things like research requests or the London Ace Con info. I started the AceCon facebook page a couple months ago and kept it up, creating some of the graphics for it as well, along with the help of many awesome UK members.

 

So that's the update on the social media side of things. I'm also working with the Answering Team to get through the giant backlog of QA emails!

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  • 5 months later...

Entirely my fault this thread lapsed last year. I would like us - not least of all me - to make a point of putting something up each month from now on.

 

Apart from my core duties the big event for me of last year was of course the UK Asexuality conference held in London. I think it was a success. We got a great turnout and some very nice feedback.

 

We plan to put on something similar this coming year, in Edinburgh this time. We are still looking for venues. Thanks everyone who has helped the search! Soon we'll put out a preliminary form for registering interest. We aren't ready to make a proper form yet.

 

Another update: I've been liaising with the tech team and we're looking into the possibility of installing a new AVEN chat. A few years ago our IP.chat had to be taken down as it was no longer supported. Coles and the tech team did a good job putting up a new chat (much more limited options with the new software). However it isn't entirely satisfactory and the tech team are looking into alternatives based on member feedback. Main complaints are the chat is somewhat buggy and not really very visible. (It's at the very bottom of the forum.) Compatible options are very limited and nothing is confirmed yet.

 

Aside from general PT duties (media and research for me), I intend to continue to work on the UK this year. We will need more members of our UK activism team as some are no longer active. Invitation thread coming soon...

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It's been a hectic few months with work outside of AVEN, so some of my projects have been pushed to the side. This will change in the coming months. I plan to tweak/update some of the FAQ with 2016 Ace Community Survey data. There will also be discussions on what else needs to be updated on the main page to make sure the information is relevant. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Our social media has been booming!! As usual, I must give a big shoutout to my sweet social media helper, @OptimisticPessimist. She's been killer on Twitter. <3 Some updates on things:

  • AVEN's Twitter has reached nearly 12.4K followers! According to Twitter, we gain about 15 followers a day. : ) 
  • There was some confusion about our twitter being the official AVEN one because there are a few "aven" accounts out there...so to try and curb confusion, I put the full name of AVEN in the title until we can get the official, authenticated blue check mark next to our account.
  • Our Facebook is 7 people away from having 18,000 likes! But we have over 18,000 followers (the two are separate). I've been doing my best to schedule something, usually an article, to be posted every other day, and sometimes everyday. 
  • AAW was the biggest moment for our social media last year...we posted a ton and got so much attention. It was awesome!
  • I've made our Tumblr much more active than it was, and we even received a comment about that. : ) Saying they were glad to see more activity on it. I usually reblog interesting posts, more often art and memes there.
  • Just checked, and our Tumblr has over 10,000 followers!

So yeah! Answering people's questions through our social media is also a big thing. All is going well. :cake:

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  • 1 month later...

I've been supporting several student projects this month, finding volunteers from our media team. I think the latter needs an overhaul though - we could do with more volunteers. (Reminder: you can sign up at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfm5D6oU9YsdrbS1C4wG2Z7abH9s0F-EPI94lgL2WXTe4ElLQ/viewform here.)

 

We also now have a form for expressing interest in the Edinburgh conference. We have a possible venue but it isn't yet confirmed and it would really help to have some idea of numbers. So please if you're interested, sign up here! The Edinburgh conference is Sun 23 June, day after Edinburgh Pride.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScej4iXSZQl223OZo9hmDYfK01GS9e1tywJhK8FxyH78GStkg/viewform

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  • 4 months later...

It's been several months here...apologies. :ph34r:

 

Things have been super busy, especially on our social media. I was working closely with Mic and the others to make Edinburgh UK Asexual Conference a success, which it was! This is the Facebook page for it: https://www.facebook.com/UKAceConference/

 

A lot of posts were done to advertise for that, along with the many, many other pride events going on in June, like the Ace of Clubs! There were lots of ace pride articles and information, photos, etc. to share. :) 

 

Our followers have increased on each platform, too:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks Kelico for restarting this and I'm sorry for not keeping this up to date on my end. At present rate we really need to rename this thread to something other than "monthly" bulletin... :(

 

That said, most of you will know what I've been working at.

 

The big thing was of course the UK Asexuality Conference in Edinburgh. @nameinagame (a local to Edinburgh) and I led the organisation for this but we had many others to help! I think the conference was a success. We had 160 register and 120 turn up on the day - which isn't bad, albeit less than the previous year, as Edinburgh is less accessible for many UK people. It was a great choice of location though as it made things accessible to a different audience, and the venue was also really good. We have formed link with new organisations as a result, e.g. Stonewall UK and certain parts of the civil service, and there will be a radio piece out soon interviewing people from the conference.

 

The other big event I've been involved with is the Ace of Clubs event, an ace bar in London running the weekend before Pride. Really the credit here goes to @yazybee - I just did some consultation for the event on behalf of AVEN to make sure the event was ace friendly.

 

Other things: I've continued to coordinate media pieces. These days I try not to appear myself, rather delegating to others on the media team, but I made an exception for the piece on the BBC World Service (Korea), along with @yazybee

https://www.bbc.com/korean/news-48257715

 

@yazybee and I are also presenting on asexuality at parliament in a few weeks (to staff and workers I believe, not MPs!)

 

I've also continued to correspond with the ONS about the 2021 UK census and their sexual orientation question. There is good news and bad news here. Asexuality isn't an explicit option but there is a write-in "other" option for people whose sexual orientation isn't straight, lesbian/gay or bisexual. We have convinced them to include asexuality as a suggested option in the guidance, which is great. The bad news is that they are defining "sexual orientation" effectively to include romantic attraction too, and suggesting people may write "gay" or "straight" if they are sexually *or romantically* attracted to the opposite/same sex. This could lead to undercounting asexuals (e.g. a heteroromantic asexual person might put themselves down as straight). This really deserves a thread in itself.

 

Next up is planning for AAW and supporting efforts to revamp the front page. Also as soon as we resolve the technical problems with our fundraiser, I will talk to the tech team to see where the efforts are to install a new chat.

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  • 2 months later...

A few new info pages have been created ahead of Asexual Awareness Week. They're not in the drop-down menu on the main page yet, but the pages are up and you can get sneak peaks at them:

 

Asexuals and Attitudes Towards Sex: https://asexuality.org/?q=attitudes.html

Romantic Orientations: https://asexuality.org/?q=romanticorientation

The Gray Area: https://www.asexuality.org/?q=grayarea

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  • 1 month later...

The main thing I've been up to in the last 3 months is coordinating some AAW events. @yazybee and I presented to parliament as mentioned, and the UK activism group I've been coordinating made presentations during AAW at several different UK cities. We also now have slides and flyers available for AAW. Thanks everyone who contributed to this effort. Really all I did was get people together; others did the heavy lifting here. Of course I've also answered a bunch of media requests, many coming out of AAW. One - from the BBC - arose directly from the Edinburgh conference earlier this year; a documentary and BBC article should be coming out shortly.

 

Next year I hope we can step up our UK AAW efforts and get more events arranged and earlier. It was all a bit last minute this year, following on from the conference and a busy summer work schedule...

 

The fundraiser technical problems are resolved and the tech team have finally found a viable new chat. The payment has been made, the installation done (thanks tech team!) and we're now in testing phase.

 

I'm meeting with Lori Brotto of UBC and their student next week while I'm in Vancouver to talk about the way AVEN handles research requests. This isn't my main area of course (as I coordinate media, and the current dedicated research contact is @Jarle) but I hope to exchange ideas with the UBC researchers, with the aim of making the research accrediation process on AVEN more efficient while preserving member safety. I'll report back on the discussion.

 

A lot of progress has been made in the last few months in the UK workplace. AVEN is due to be giving training and workshops at several workplaces especially in England over the next year. (Hopefully the other UK countries will follow.) Unfortunately these are internal events so can't be advertised widely, but it's definitely a natural next step in our vis-ed efforts: we've had a lot of success in uni campuses over the last few years, but the workplace has been somewhat lacking in our outreach. Hopefully this signals a change, at least in UK context.

 

Next year's UK asexuality conference is currently slated for Reading, a bit later than usual: first Sunday of September, to make it the same weekend as Reading Pride. This would allow us to hold the event in collaboration with MyUmbrella. I will be checking out the venue in December, and if it's all good perhaps we can adverise early next calendar year.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 10/6/2019 at 12:25 PM, Snaonderneath a Mistlecone said:

A few new info pages have been created ahead of Asexual Awareness Week. They're not in the drop-down menu on the main page yet, but the pages are up and you can get sneak peaks at them:

 

Asexuals and Attitudes Towards Sex: https://asexuality.org/?q=attitudes.html

Romantic Orientations: https://asexuality.org/?q=romanticorientation

The Gray Area: https://www.asexuality.org/?q=grayarea

Just to update on this, these links are now live under the About Asexuality drop-down menu on the main site!

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Quiet month for me, following the activity of AAW. A few media and student requests. Probably the most significant thing from a PT point of view was my visit to Lori Brotto's lab in Vancouver, where @Heart and I had an in-depth conversation with Brotto and her student Sonia about the way AVEN handles research requests, and what we may do to facilitate ace research. There are several ideas here and before discussing them openly I'd like to run them past the new DRC (noms now open!) and the outgoing DRC, @Jarle. I will post about them on AVEN in due course though.

 

UK civil service workshops are still being planned for early next year, culminating in a day conference towards the summer. Hopefully this will also be an opportunity to drum up interest for the UK Asexuality Conference (which is open to everyone), planned for 6 Sept in Reading.

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Social media has been trucking along at a steady pace the past few months. Not a whole lot to discuss. @OptimisticPessimist has been an absolute gem with our Twitter, keeping it active basically all day, everyday! Here are the current number of followers:

 

  • Facebook: 21,831 (getting closer to 22k...)
  • Twitter: 17.8k (a huge jump since the last time I posted)
  • Tumblr10,974 (almost to 11k!)
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  • 2 months later...

Social media update--been posting regularly on all platforms, OP handling Twitter like a beast, you know, the usual. : ) Aro Awareness Week in February brought up our numbers quite a bit as we did a lot of extra posting about aro-spec goodness. Here are the current number of followers:

  • Facebook: 22,385
  • Twitter: 20.1k!!!!!!!!! (We jumped nearly 3,000 since the last time!)
  • Tumblr11,204 (yes, we made it to 11k!)
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Since the start of the year there have been 39 emails to the answering team, with only six awaiting reply currently. I'm hoping we'll have those answered by the end of the week :) 

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  • 10 months later...

So I've said this before, but as a new year resolution I'd like to make a better attempt at keeping this up to date this year! I hope to post something at the end of each month. Someone please kick me if I don't. 😛 This is just my personal update: I hope other PT will post similar.

 

Last year was a very busy one. With the pandemic striking, we needed new ways of engaging especially as physical meetups couldn't happen. Setting up the AVEN unofficial discord in March (with the help of a mod team) was an introduction to a new platform for me, and I've been connecting with a large part of the ace community, both on this server and others, that I was previously cut off from!

 

The other big events for me were the UK conference and the Haven for the Human Amoeba 20th anniversary celebration. It was the first time we've done a virtual conference so this was also very new and different! Luckily again there were lots of people to do much of the hard work, such as @Spaghetti Cat with the tech side.

 

Well that was last year. What about this month? It's also been busy. As usual I've dealt with several media enquiries, including Pink News and Vice. I've been one of the AVEN reps, helping to put together International Asexuality Day, which was just announced. (Note, AVEN is only one of many international organisations collaborating on this event. There is no one single "owner".) Actually the preparations for this have not been just this month, but have stretched back over half a year!

 

Here are some things coming up:

  • We have a new Dedicated Research Contact, and we are rethinking how we handle Research Requests as a team. More on that in due course (probably from @SpirallingSnowy herself!)
  • The AVEN 20th anniversary is coming up in March! We have already had an AVENues special edition for this (great work @scarletlatitude and all who put that together!) but we're thinking about what else we might do.
  • WorldPride 2021 is this year! It is theoretically in Denmark, so I'm coordinating with the local ace organisations over there for what we might do. It's not clear yet if we can have a physical march and conference - especially if it's international, the way we usually do for WorldPrides - so we may go virtual instead.
  • The UK acecon 2021 is also on the horizon. We haven't yet decided if this will be virtual or physical (or indeed if it will happen at all as a separate event - we might merge it into the WorldPride celebrations).

 

See you next month I hope! :cake:

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SpirallingSnowy

Hi all ☺️So as ive been DRC for just a few weeks,  so don’t have as big an update as Mic.

 

In case you live under a rock 😛, the Asexual Lived Experiences survey 2021 came out from Australian Asexuals & ACT Aces. We’ve hade 1394 responses so far, but only a 59% completion rate- I will be posting about this  in its thread here:

 

The thread about retweaking the research requests process is here:

we have had a couple of research requests including this one I need some help with:


We also have a request in the emails for research links on Asexuality - 

 

Any good suggestions would be awesome ☺️
 

 

I’ve had my hands full with IAD launch ( organising things and I’m running the fb page) , the Survey, my kid and I have been sick, and he’s just started achool, so will be on a bit more now things are settling. 
 

Anywho that’s it from me ☺️

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Wow, it's been a while since my last update...apologies! :lol: Since the last time, @OptimisticPessimist is still being the all-time champion of Twitter, but we also added an Instagram to our arsenal, which OP also handles! We've also more or less officially taken over the Facebook Group that's been around a while. We changed it from a public group to private because there were too many trolls commenting. We're doing our best to handle it and any issues that arise. 

 

Here are our updated follower amounts!

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

For February:

  • I've continued participating in International Asexuality Day talks (representing AVEN UK, as one of the organisations and countries involved).
  • I've had a planning meeting with Danish Aces about the coming WorldPride in Denmark, and also a meeting with the AVEN UK activism team. We are planning a virtual conference for the weekend of 14-15 August 2021. Watch this space!
  • We will probably have a livestream next year, for the 20th anniversary of the AVEN forums. We might have a smaller celebration of some kind next month to mark the 20th anniversary of the site itself.
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