We wrapped our latest monthly committee meeting this week, and we will endeavour to share the minutes in the coming days as usual. But there were 3 quick hits I felt were worth posting on their own, as they have some potential future & wider implications. I also want to spur on some debate with a call-to-action for feedback below.

1. Those who have followed our committee minutes and any open discussions we’ve had know that we have been discussing the option to move our corporate member operations out to a third party who can give it more time, attention, love and innovation. We’re full of great ideas as a committee, but we’re bereft of time given this is a voluntary gig. We voted unanymously to accept terms offered by a wonderful partner with bags of experience working alongside nonprofit orgs like us, in the green energy & sustainabilty space. More on this to come as we finalise details, but we’re excited for this development.
2. If you follow our social media presence you’ll have seen us ask some ominous questions about a name change. Most notably, to drop the owners part of our monicker and go in-line with our UK & some European association counterparts. We voted unanimously to change our name to IEVA (Irish EV Association), and we had a 3-way split vote on when to do it. As chair, I took the decision to do it before our next AGM (next April) to give us time to plan, communicate and execute the change. This shouldn’t be too taxing as it doesn’t impact our consitution and we can simply trade as from a corporate governance perspective.
3. We launched /q. This is a quick, simple page members can use to tell us when they’re seeing queues at public charging locations. This simply gives us a broader sense of when and where people are finding difficulties with charging, so we can take that information to the powers that be. We recommend you share this amongst any EV drivers you know, and to bookmarket on your phone so it’s handy to get to when needed.

And finally, my CTA is to drop me an email with any thoughts or opinions on us opening up our own hosted discussion forum/Q&A platform/wiki (or all 3!). We’ve heard feedback that folks 1) don’t want to join Facebook in the first place or 2) would like to ditch it and are being holdovers with us. Any input is welcome. I don’t want to open something up which immediately goes silent and isn’t useful, so the more opinion we get, the better.