[wplug-board] -members@ posting regarding dues changes

Bill Moran wmoran at potentialtech.com
Fri Jul 21 12:48:31 EDT 2006


The following is a draft to send to the members list:

There will be a members meeting at the upcomming GUM on Aug 5.

It's very important that we get a good attendance for this meeting.
The reason is that a dues issue needs to come up for vote.

The reason the board wants to raise dues it multi-faceted.  I want to
start out by saying that WPLUG does not have any money problems at this
time.  While we're not rich, we have enough money to fund current projects.
So offering to arbitrarily donate money, while appreciated, is not
necessary.

The first problem is attendance.  We've had a great deal of difficulty
getting quorum at membership meetings.  As a result, we've been having
less memberships meetings than we're supposed to.  These two problems
are not good.  The board (as a whole) seems to feel that the problem
is that it's so easy to become a member of WPLUG that it's a no-brainer.
Considering you get membership for the outstanding price of $0, there's
no reason I can think of for anyone to give membership a second thought.
The unfortunate result of this is it increases a number of overheads:
1) The quorum required to have a membership vote goes up with the total
   size of the membership.  As we get more and more members who don't
   show up regularly, this gets more and more difficult to accomplish.
   Which means it's more and more difficult to get enough members
   together when a vote is required.
2) The size of the board goes up.  This election will probably be for
   7 board members instead of 5.  But a large board to govern a small
   number of active members and a large number of fringe members seems
   impractical.  It makes it more difficult for the _board_ to get things
   done while not really improving the representation of active WPLUG
   members on the board.
The thought here is to make membership something to think about.  Since
most events are open to the general public, it's not that big of a deal
not to be a member.  The main benefit of membership is the ability to
vote and have a say in how WPLUG is run, but it seems that a large
portion of our members aren't participating in the voting process (even
as seldom as it occurs).
The goal here is not to scare off the poor, but to cause people to pause
for 3 seconds and think, "Do I really need to be a member?"

The second problem we're up against is a possible shift in venue.  We've
been talking about this problem off and on for over a year now, but if
you missed out, here's the scoop: for various reasons, hosting meetings at
CMU is getting more and more difficult.  We've been doing a good bit of
research into alternate meeting locations (thanks to everyone who's
helped!).  The result is that we can't find any alternate meeting
places that are completely free (as CMU was).  The good news is that
they are all fairly affordable, we need to raise the dues just a little.

The board believes we can solve these two problems by raising the dues
just a bit.  The proposed new dues would be $10.00 per year.  This does
not include pizza as it formerly did.  We believe that this is high
enough to help with the two problems listed above, but low enough that
we shouldn't lose any members purely due to financial reasons.

If anyone has any questions or concerns regarding this, please bring
them up on the plan list.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com



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