Management - New Zealand Geotechnical Society

Welcome to the NZGS committee page. This is only accessible to current committee members to enable the more efficient sharing of ideas and information.

Expenses and invoices

To claim expenses please use the form here.

If you need to raise an invoice (for example, to enable a sponsor to pay NZGS) please use the form here.

Calendars

The calendars show the Committee calendar, used for reminders about deadlines, committee meetings etc, and the Engineering NZ calendar to help avoid clashes when scheduling events.

To add events to the internal (committee only) calendar click here.

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The lower calendar is for engineering events from Engineering NZ technical groups to help avoid clashes with our own events. To add events to this calendar (shared with other engineering groups). You will need a Google account. If you don’t have one, send your request to the NZGS website manager (website@nzgs.org). To add your own event, click here to open it in Google Calendar. Press ‘Add Event (bottom right). ENZ request that you follow these instructions:

The title of each event should be formatted in the same way to show clearly the location, group/branch and event type. For example: WLG: Transportation Group, Annual Conference
The location codes will be a 3 letter abbreviation for example; WLG for Wellington
As much information as possible should be included for example, time and location. If the exact location is TBC, the geographical location alone can be used
A short description of the event is desirable and where possible should include:
– A key contact including contact details
– A web link to more information and/or registration link if applicable

Engineering New Zealand Calendar

Setting up a new event in the calendar

These instructions explain how to successfully set up an event in the NZGS website calendar.

Putting an event into the NZGS calendar, and filling in the details properly, means that more people will find out about the event as it will show up in the right places on the site. It will help avoid clashes, and enable our members to quickly import the event into their own calendars so they don’t forget to turn up.

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Log in to the NZGS website, and check that you have the right permissions – you should see a black bar across the very top of the page, which includes a ‘New’ button. If not, contact the website administrator or NZGS secretary.
Click +New in the black bar at top of page, which will bring down a menu. From the menu choose ‘Event’. A blank event will be created.
Start working down the items in the left column (steps 4 to 11).
In the ‘Enter title here box’ type the event title. Try to keep it concise so that it shows up well on small screens and in lists. Don’t put the date in the title.
In the large text field under the title enter a description. The description helps attendees decide if they would be interested in going, so a well worded explanation will really help. A few hundred words should be plenty. Remember to put who the presenter is, with a short biography if you have one.
Put in the time and date. Set the start time as the time you want people to arrive.
In the Location section, choose a venue:
1. Always start by checking if the venue is already set up. They are filed by city, so enter WEL for wellington, AKL, for Auckland CHCH for Christchurch, NEL for Nelson etc. The venue includes the specific room, so for large venues like universities where you need to specify a specific lecture theatre there may be multiple entries, one for each room. It’s important that you don’t create new entries for existing venues each time there’s an event, or it becomes much harder to manage the venues over time and there’s more risk of having mistakes.
2. If your venue doesn’t exist, you will need to create a new one.
  1. Enter the name of your venue, starting with a three letter acronym for the city so future users can re-find it (e.g. WEL – Beca, Level 6 Aorangi House, 85 Molesworth Street or AKL – Auckland University, Engineering Building, Room 1.439, 20 Symonds street). Put the building name, floor or room number in here to differentiate it from other locations in the same venue that might be created in future. Including the street address (i.e. number and road name) is helpful. Remember that people looking it up when creating future events will only see the title, so it’s important to make it useful for them as well as having enough information for attendees to find the venue easily.
  2. Click ‘Create’
  3. Enter the street address in the address field (i.e. number and road name, but nothing else, so that Google maps can identify it. Don’t put room numbers or floors in this field, or it will prevent Google Maps from showing the location accurately in the meeting invitation.
  4. You can enter the postcode, phone or website if relevant, but these aren’t essential.
Choose an organiser. This will be the contact person if there are any questions, so make sure they have accepted they might get contacted.
1. Use the search to find if the person is already set up.
2. If not, type their name and press ‘Create’. Enter their phone number and email address.
Choose the relevant branch for the event. This is important to make it appear on the branch home page, and so that people can filter to their local events.
Select if the event is free or paid. If it is paid, under the cost amount enter the cost for NZGS members.
If there is a flyer associated with the event
1. Click ‘Add row’ in the event downloads section
2. Click ‘Add file’
3. Give your flyer a suitable file name. Start with the date of the event in reverse, then “flyer”, then the speaker name (e.g. 2018-05-08 flyer Bob Dylan.pdf). You can add the topic if appropriate after this. Using this naming convention is important so that we can easily find them later.
Now move back to the top and work down the right column.
Choose the event type from the list. Make sure you choose at least one, as these drive the filters to help people find the most relevant events.
Choose the event organisation. This is important as if you don’t choose NZGS it won’t get promoted on the front page of the website.
Choose the event country. This is important as only events in New Zealand get promoted on the front page. Choose from either ‘New Zealand’, ‘Australia’ or ‘Other’. Please don’t add new countries; the aim is to make filtering simple.
Choose a featured image. This puts a thumbnail up against the list in the calendar. The default choice is the logo of the organising group body (e.g. NZGS).
1. Click ‘set featured image’. The media library will open.
2. Type ‘logo’ in the search box to find the relevant logo. If the logo isn’t there, find a JPG and upload it. Ensure you change the file name to start with ‘Logo’ before you do, or ot won’t appear in future searches (e.g. Logo NZGS.jpg).
Go to the top right of the page in the publish section.
1. If you have more to add, or want someone to review it first, press ‘Save draft’
2. If you have finished, press ‘Publish’
If the event is part of a series, press ‘Duplicate This’ in the Publish section (top right) to create the next event in the series, then change the date and venue as appropriate.

Setting up a new post in the news section – including job advertisements and expressions of interest

These instructions explain how to successfully set up an new post in the NZGS news section. The most recent five posts will also be shown in the home page. If a post is tagged as a job or as an expression of interest it will also appear in the pre-defined search pages for these items (see buttons on home page).

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In the black bar, press “+New” and from the dropdown choose ‘Post’. Anything you create as a post goes into the news section. The ‘Add a New Post’ page should open up.
Enter a title. It should be short enough that it won’t wrap around too many lines, bur descriptive enough that the right people choose to read it. If you look at the NZGS home page, and see the ‘Latest News’ section, the text in orange is the title. A good example would be “Abstracts open for IAEG Asian Regional Conference”. Alternatives such as “IAEG Asian Regional Conference” or “Call for Abstracts” wouldn’t have enough information, and “IAEG has recently issued the call for abstracts for the IAEG Asian Regional Conference in Korea” would be too long.
Next you need to enter the body of the news item in the big white box. The menus at the top look a bit like MS Word, and function in a similar way. There’s a few things you need to know to get this working smoothly:
1. If you put a PDF or similar in here, it won’t re-size nicely to fit different screens. This means that people on phones or tablets won’t be able to read it, and it may look odd on browsers. Plain text is much better – and can be more easily searched.
2. You don’t need to put the heading in at the top of the white box – it picks it up from the main heading field, so you’ll end up with it twice.
3. To get the fonts right, enter it as plain text then use the pre-defined styles. Select the text you want to format, then press “Format” > “Blocks” and choose the style that’s most appropriate. The text editor gives you an idea of how they’ll look, but it ends up looking a bit better once published. You can press preview to see how the different styles look. In general, we use:
  1. Headings 1-6 – use Heading 1 for top level, then work down. We rarely get below Heading 4 level
  2. Paragraph – use for all ‘normal’ text between headings
  3. Bullet lists – great for lists of dates etc, but try not to over-use.
  4. Numbered lists
4. If taking text provided by a third party, you don’t need to put it all in, just what you feel is relevant to NZGS members – and you don’t need to keep their formatting. Use our site formatting instead.
5. You can copy and paste text in – but be careful as it may import some formatting that you need to then get rid of. Do this by selecting all (or all relevant) text, and pressing “Format” > “Clear formatting”.
6. For hyperlinks, type (or paste) the link address, then select it and press the link button (looks like a chain) in the text editor tool bar, then press the blue “apply” button to turn it into a link. If you want to present some text instead of a hyperlink, click on the settings box that opens up, and you can change the link text.
7. Once your text is done, you can add an expiry (if it’s not relevant after a certain date) – this makes the post disappear after that date – or tag in a specific branch if the news relates only to one branch. This makes the post appear on the branch’s own page.
8. In the boxes on the right hand side, choose the post type. This ensures that it shows up in the correct list and allows people to see just job adverts, just EoIs etc:
  1. Tick “News” for any news.
  2. Tick “Expression of interest” for any post asking for volunteers to assist the NZGS.
  3. Tick “Jobs” for paid job advertisements
9. Set an expiry date if approprate. This will normally only apply to job adverts (which should expire on a date based on when the client has paid until) or expressions of interest (which should expire a week after the expresion closes – we usually leave them up for a week so that latecomers know they’ve missed the deadline). Most news items don’t have an expiry.
10. Choose a ‘cover image’. This isn’t essential, except for job advertisements which should have the company logo.
11. At the top right, press “Preview” to check it looks OK. This will open in a new tab, which you can close without losing your work.
12. If it does look OK, press the blue “Publish” button.