APEX Yearly Report - 2009
A few notes on the year 2009 which is about to leave us forever. It was a hectic year, especially for the Board of Directors. There were many nights that someone didn’t sleep much or not at all. Messages that needed an urgent answer and the time differences between the locations where the Board Members live (Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK, The Netherlands, etc) were the cause of that. That meant working very late or, if you prefer, very early.
For our Members a lot has changed and very hard work was at the basis of the tasks your Board of Directors had to put up with. If you ever thought that a Directors job was just a title, forget it. Some of the Directors were so stressed in the end, that they actually let us know - that they would quit after their official run of Office. I hope they relent now that the hard work is done for a while.
[ TOP ]
The APEX Charter was totally revised, step by step, line by line. Rhonda, our Director of Operations, was near a burn-out. I am not kidding you. There were long and rather heated discussions within the Board of Directors again and again but all that resulted in a completely new Charter which, in fact, is our only document that tells every Member and Director what has to be done, can not be done and how to do or not to do it - a law book by which the APEX Association is run. The previous Charter lasted approximately seven (7) years and it was in dire need of an update.
We also now have, thanks to Rhonda, a much needed “Board of Directors and Audit Staff Manual.” The idea behind that is to provide APEX Directors and the Auditing Group with an easy reference in respect to several APEX Membership and auditing requirements not specified within the APEX Charter documents.
[ TOP ]
As APEX Members, you saw only a few of the results of all the work achieved - merely a new, ID coded APEX badge. This came about due to our finding a website that displayed the old, uncoded APEX badge but the website had never been admitted to APEX Membership. Thus the ID coded badge was born and with the new badge the trick of copy/paste was history!
Thanks to Denny, our Director of Memberships, the Copyright Statement in Simplified Form model was created for our Members. It is not compulsory to use it, but advised. That statement, when used, must be accompanied by a mention that the statement is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Privacy Policy/Statements or the equivalent (TOS) - Terms of Service or (TOU) Terms of Use were also successfully worked on by Denny during 2009 and all of his many hours of hard work have gone towards enhancing APEX further than previously envisaged.
[ TOP ]
It was clear that the Code of Ethics (COE) was, although being well cared for by ACN, in a state of limbo and was, in some instances, being abused in respect of Licensing requirements. It was decided that as an ethical Association we should seek our Members respect the License. Again, it is not compulsory to display a Code of Ethics (COE) but if 20% or more of the identical content of the original “stripped” Code of Ethics (COE) content is used, it means the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License must be displayed.
Work has been completed on the APEX Memberships .RDF Schema with the longterm vision being to involve all types of websites (with the exclusion of those not acceptable to APEX as specified within ourr Charter) developing specifically appropriate .rdf files. Our APEX badge with ID and the apex.rdf technically work together identifying you as someone whose website practices ethics and the principles of APEX.
As for 2010 and what it will bring for APEX? One never knows for with the imaginative thoughts and creativity of our current Board of Directors anything is possible. All I do know for certain is that APEX can only improve and grow.
Luuk Francken - APEX CEO.