Speakeasy Toastmasters is a thriving cooperative where everyone makes a contribution to producing a vibrant club, but none more so than the founder and updater of the amazing resource that is the club’s website, Sean Corcoran.
At every Toastmaster meeting up to 16 members are involved with roles at the meeting. These include the speakers and their evaluators, the toastmaster, topicsmaster, guest greeters, timekeeper, grammarian and the general evaluator. For every role there is an information sheet, which is a great help in defining the requirements of each role. These sheets were compiled by Sean and are one of the many useful resources available to members on the club website. Nearly every member of a Toastmaster Club also at some stage serves in some and for most people , in every! role on the committee. The roles are, Guest Greeters, Secretary, Membership, Treasurer, PRO, Educational Vice President and President. The website serves all committee members with all sorts of information and resources to help them perform their role.
Besides this wonderful and stress reducing font of information, there is also plenty of entertaining aspects to the website. It gives a history of the club, the roll of honour, -namely all who have served as Club Presidents. It has a photo album and newspaper cuttings where all the occasions down the years can be scrutinized. There are links to other types of publicity the club has had, such as utube recordings of members giving prize winning speeches, radio interviews and television programmes that have been produced on the club. Weekly articles are sent to local papers and these are uploaded by Sean to the club website blogspot and twitter. This blog has articles dating back to 2002. If you have a job that requires computer skills or indeed computer parts you don’t have, you can be assured Sean will find them for you.
Besides devising and updating the website, Sean Corcoran has served in every role in Speakeasy including that of President. He puts the same thoughtfulness into everything he does and some good humour too. In the Topics session where a member is expected to speak for 2 minutes on a given topic Sean can totally convince with his great delivery when in reality he is unbelievably yes,- bluffing. At meetings Sean goes out of his way to include the welcome guests and to encourage new members. He is a proponent of life long education and taking on new challenges. That is why he epitomises the best spirit of Speakeasy Toastmasters. On the 20th Anniversary, its time to pay a tribute to the webmaster. Sean Corcoran, take a bow.
