Lib Dem Federal Executive report - 28 October 2013

Last night's Federal Executive meeting was a little strange. It must have been even stranger for Tim Farron who had to chair a meeting of 30 or so people when some were in the room, some were on the phone and a few more were on the internet, their webcams being projected onto the screen in Liberal Democrat HQ. Which was fine until I put my iPad down for a minute and it slipped down the back of the sofa amid, no doubt, all sorts of rubbish. I hope nobody was watching too closely.

Last night's agenda was busy. We talked about membership - increasing, in some areas exponentially, diversity engagement, the coming year's budget. Don Foster, the new chief whip, came in and gave the political update, telling us that Liberal Democrat MPs and peers are working hard to deliver Lib Dem priorities on the Immigration and Lobbying bills. We also fed back to him that we felt more needed to be done for people on low incomes who were really struggling and he took that on board.

One good thing to come out of a Twitter conversation we were having on engaging membership is a plan to do a skills audit of our members in the first part of next year. We have some very talented people in our party and we maybe need to invite them to share their knowledge and experience with us. For example, I know someone who has experience in video production, something that could be very useful to us in the months ahead.

I created a Storify thingy of (mainly) mine and Daisy Cooper's tweets. If you have any questions, ask away.