Last night, a historic 2 hour conference call marked the peaceful transition of power from the founding committee of the Buggy Alumni Association to the 50% newly elected committee that will lead us forward into 2011.

We covered administrative details of course, but we wanted to take this moment to step back and appraise our progress towards advancing the five goals stated in our mission.  The questions we asked ourselves were, “How have we done in our first two years?” and “What ideas do we have to keep things moving forward?”

Preserve and make accessible the history of the sport
Grade so far : B+

Efforts so far
–  Created a database of buggy history, solicited data, and put it on the web
–  Created an online gallery of pictures and solicited pictures from the university and alumni
–  Helped to promote and facilitate the now-perennial History of Buggy presentations

Ideas for 2011
– Improve the integration between media and history [enable tagging of people / buggies]
– Create a data entry back-end so that new data can be quickly included and not sit in a queue
– Make it easier to contribute pictures and video
– Offer to help digitizing analog pictures and video
– Look into a physical space to archive buggy memorabilia Continue reading →

Seniors, sign up between now and graduation to get a year’s worth of members-only benefits for free!  Congrats on graduating, and congrats on making it 4 years without seeing a single day of races rained out, and congrats on joining the exciting world of being a buggy alum.

We need to prepare you for something difficult now: you’ll have to make it through next year without buggy.  It’s going to be tough.  Take our word from it, we’ve been there.  Let us help by offering you a year of Dues-Paying-Member benefits for free (a $10 value!).  Those benefits include:

• Fall 2010 Report – get in depth details about the fall semester
• Spring 2011 Raceday Preview – get the comprehensive coverage of each and every team so that you’re in the loop when you come back to your first raceday as an alum
• Raceday 2011 Reception – mingle with other alumni after the races
• Raceday 2011 Wrap-up – a look back on everything that happened

All you have to do is sign up before graduation:

http://cmubuggy.org/seniors

Two exec committee positions are up for election, and we’re looking for candidates NOW. This is a call to action for serious volunteers who want to see the BAA through the next couple years of growth. The two positions open this spring are President and Vice President. (Treasurer and Secretary will be filled in the fall so that we have some transitional overlap.)

If you’re interested, please comment on this news post with the position you want and, if you like, a campaign spiel. You can also send email to admin@cmubuggy.org if you’re too modest to speak out here.

Elections will be via an online poll early next week!

Here are some example criteria:

* Someone who has been vocal on the forum with good ideas and creative input.
* Someone who likes what we do and wants to be more involved.
* Someone who has plenty of time in the Spring to work on BAA stuff.
* Nominees do NOT have to be Pittsburgh locals.
* You can nominate someone else if he/she agrees.

Here’s a slice of what we do:
Continue reading →

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone that participated in the second annual lead truck auction this year.  Thank you x2000 to the anonymous buggy lover that matched the first $2000 in bids.  The BAA committee was betting mid-day on Monday whether or not we would be able to reach our $2,000 goal, and only our confident treasurer, Chris Stengel put his money on making it all the way there.  He cooked the books a bit by being an active bidder himself, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  By lunch time, the total was around $1300, but the pace was quick from there on out, averaging about $100/hr.   Hope everyone had fun and got the heats that they wanted.  We’ll be contacting the winners shortly.

• Number of bids : 365
• Number of bidders : 38
• Total raised for the BAA and for buggy: $2,092 + $2000 in matching funds = $4,092!
• Most expensive heat : 1st pick for Men’s finals at $161 won by Abby
• Number of heats won by folks from each org Continue reading →

We sent out one of our favorite members-only perks last night around midnight: our Raceday Preview.  This year’s 11-page publication covers each team in depth with pictures, stats, and narratives.  If you haven’t followed along all year, we hope that it gets you up to speed for raceday.  If you’re a regular cmubuggy.org junkie, we know your hunger to consume buggy material this time of year in insatiable, but that you’ll like this pdf especially.

If you’re not a member yet, follow the big “Join” button from this page:

http://cmubuggy.org/join/

It’s only $10, you get a whole list of members-only benefits, and you’re helping to support our efforts to make buggy better than ever.  If you can keep the option, “Display my name in the list of attendees for this event” checked when paying your dues on the AH site, that lets us quickly confirm that you’re paid up.  Send us an e-mail at admin@cmubuggy.org, and you’ll have your pdf in no time.

If you have already paid your dues but didn’t get the email overnight, send us an e-mail at admin@cmubuggy.org.  We don’t always have the most up-to-date data from alumni house, or we may have just screwed up.  We’ll remedy things quickly.

This is the one weekend per year that we don’t publish a rolls-report, so I apologize if you were checking eagerly this morning for that.  You’ve got to chip in to get your fix this week.  There are plenty of pictures from the weekend (here and here).

Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, compubookie’s annual post is available online here at thetartan.org

It’s that exciting time of year in the buggy world for teams and alumni alike.

We’ve just been contacted by an extremely generous anonymous donor that is pledging up to $2000 to the BAA as a matching gift to whatever we raise from the lead truck auction.  This is by far the largest gift we’ve received to date, and we can say how honored we are to warrant such a generous contribution.  It just goes to show how much buggy means to all of us buggy alumni, and we’re just glad we can be here to help keep everyone connected.

That said, the most important thing we need to focus on now is that this is a matching donation. We don’t have any of that gift yet.  It’s up to you! Every dollar that you bid in the lead truck auction will be doubled.  To earn the entire $2000 pledge, we need to get $2000 in bids from all the rest of you passionate buggy fans. Continue reading →