[wplug-members] IMPORTANT Membership Meeting on Saturday, August 5th, 2006

[David Ostroske]

This announcement comes from Bill Moran, the Chair of WPLUG. I've
reformatted what he's written and included the time place for the
meeting, but otherwise, it hasn't been changed.
---

There will be a WPLUG membership meeting at the upcoming GUM on
Saturday, August 5th, 2006. The GUM will run from 10:00am to 2:00pm at
CMU Newell Simon Hall 3002. The business portion of the meeting will
start at 10:30am.

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 a vote.

The reason the board wants to raise dues is 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 wplug-plan list.

-- 
David Ostroske <eksortso at gmail.com>