RISM’s Extraordinary General Meeting

An EGM was held by RISM on 23^rd February 2012 for the main purpose of seeking approval to use a certain amount of money for renovation works to the RISM building.  Additionally, it was intended to amend parts of the Bye-Laws, which were considered inappropriate due to developments in RISM.

The conferment of royal status to ISM was already common knowledge.  Together with this uplift in status comes the responsibility of ensuring that we are also uplifted in other aspects.  And, this include the uplift that’s needed for our RISM building as well.  Evidently, we can’t be proud to host visitors to RISM in our current condition - to host them at the lower ground floor would be an embarrassment, what more if our guest is the Royal Highness himself, who is our patron, or even his palace officials. So, the least that should be done is to have a decent Board Room that could be used to not only host guests, but also for other purposes, including for conducting Council and Divisional meetings.  Apart from that, the signage will have to be changed in accordance with the institution’s name change, renovations be made to the 3^rd Floor and Lower Ground Floor, as well as the lift to be upgraded to increase its speed.

The initial rough estimate for the aforementioned works is about RM 600,000; the major portion of which is for the works on the lift – it self estimated to be around RM 300,000.  Although the current and projected financial position of RISM for 2012 looks healthy, and we are in a position to take up the whole of those works concurrently, but the strategy is to undertake it in phases, i.e. the renovation works in the first and the lift work in the second phase.  In this context, the ample profits of the 2011 SEA Survey Congress and International Survey Congress would evidently be more than adequate to finance the renovation works, and as such pose no extra burden to RISM’s financial state.  However, the Bye-Laws has it that the spending of more than RM 50,000.00 would require the approval of the EGM, and obviously this would have to be abided.

The second object of the EGM is to amend the Bye-Laws dealing with the conversion of study loan to scholarship, admission of technicians and the definition of the newly introduced terminology - “Chapter”.

On the conversion of study loan to scholarship, it has been the norm for RISM to provide study loan to students undertaking studies in any of the four disciplines related to RISM.  Correspondingly, RISM believes that students should be motivated to excel in their studies; one form of incentive is to allow them to convert their loan to scholarship if they achieve excellent results upon graduation.  For this reason, amendment needs to be made to the Bye-Laws to provide for this conversion, albeit this has already been earlier practiced.

Pertaining to the proposed provision to cater for the admission of technicians, there has actually been an earlier introduction of another class of membership called “technician” in the Constitution, at the last EGM in June, 2011.  The technicians were constitutionally considered as non-corporate members - similar to graduate, probationer and student. However, no corresponding provision on the general rules for their admission has been made in the Bye-Laws, as with the other classes and hence the need to introduce this new section.

The third proposal is in regards to the need to provide for a definition on “Chapter” in the Bye-Laws.  This new term was introduced in the Bye-Laws, again at the last EGM in the 2012, to cater for the formation of the UK Chapter.  Due to the fact that there were definitions of Branch and Division, already in the Bye-Laws, it would thus be coherent to also have a definition of the Chapter incorporated as well.

All the aforementioned proposals were discussed at length, and it ended with positive outcomes; in short as follows:

i)          Approval of RM 250,000 to be spent on renovation works;

ii)        Approval of RM 300,000 for the lift upgrade, whenever the financial situation permits; and

iii)       Approval of all proposed amendments to the Bye-laws.

Thus, another important part of the work for RISM was cleared and the subsequent no-less important task of implementing the decisions will need to be undertaken.