Minutes of Dec 12th Meet

[PankajKulkarni]

Around 15 people came to the meeting. The main agenda was to discuss the next steps for the group.

The main concern was that while people are bubbling with ideas, execution takes a backseat because most members cannot spare the time. Pankaj Kulkarni made a proposal that the group should keep its agenda very simple -- just organize meetings once a month. Members can use this as a platform to form their own subgroups to execute their pet projects. The presentation prepared by Pankaj is attached to this thread.

Aditya M volunteered to be the primary convener for organizing the meetings, maintining contact information on googledocs, and sending updates and invites to all Bangalore freethinkers. Sri Harsha and Pankaj volunteered to be backup conveners.

Vijay proposed a project of including a chapter on scientific thinking/skepticism in school textbooks. Satish also liked the idea and they are going to form a subgroup to work on this project.

Pankaj, Dolly and Vijeta took up the project of conducting a workshop by Narendra Nayak for Bangalore professionals.

The subgroups will update status on their projects in the next meeting.

The next meeting is scheduled for 16th January, 2010 at 10:30am at Ashok Shishu Vihar (pushed to 3rd week this time due to the World Atheist Conference 7-9th Jan)

[donatello]

We had another nice meet yesterday. Other than what Pankaj has written, we also met Amardeo Sarma, who is the Founder and Chairman of the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Parasciences (Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften - GWUP). He has agreed to take up the role of an advisor for our group. He also told us about the 1023 Homeopathy: there's nothing in it campaign. I think we should participate in the event. Let's start planning it!

Also, here's the pic from the meet:



Picture by Sathish. The other pics that I took, can't be published because I shook my hand (surely in excitement ) while taking the pic

[Ajita Kamal]

This is excellent stuff folks! Sri Harsha, Aditya and Pankaj, along with the others, your efforts are inspiring! I noted that Prof Nayak may be attending the next one. Please keep us all informed. We will continue publicizing these meets. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to write a blog post about it. If it goes up on Nirmukta we can get it published on RD.net, and then there should be more interest in the Bangalore Freethinkers!