Hiya! I know I'm new around here, in fact this is my first email (my apologies, its a long one) to the group, I'd like to help, for what its worth, I'm an FSE for Ericsson. I've also served on several non or not for profit boards, and I have some thoughts. Good governance is really important, that said, you can do it without requiring approval for every expenditure, set a yearly budget (like for project or capital expenditures), don't allow money to be spent outside of those budgets without voting. Nothing you can do will stop people of trust from violating that trust of the group - in short, locks keep honest people honest, all you can do is make sure you have good records to ensure that if they do violate that trust, you can nail them to a wall. We can perform good governance without making this all feel like work. I would also suggest staggering the terms for the board in the future, so we don't run into a situation where we have no acting board because everyone termed out, there should always be enough of a board to have some quorum. Lastly, an inline reply: On 2/18/2014 10:22 AM, Nigel Vander Houwen wrote:
Lastly, this is certainly a personal opinion, and I cannot speak for others, but we are in amateur radio as a hobby. We do it because it is enjoyable. It is not a job, and while we strive hard to provide the best service possible, it's too easily forgotten that we are ALL volunteers. Our time, our money, our expertise is freely given to the project because we enjoy doing so. Let's continue to do that, and not make it another job that we will never get paid for.
Exactly, make the hobby feel too much like work, and it becomes work. EMCOMM is important, but it should work hand in hand with us doing this stuff for fun - meaning for me at least, if we can do EMCOMM and have fun, all the better, but doing either one at the exclusion of the other, is in my mind, wrong. EMCOMM is merely one facet of Ham Radio as a hobby and again, in my opinion shouldn't be the be all, end all of anything we as radio amateurs do. I'd argue the knowledge gained in building these networks is actually more useful in emergencies than the preexisting networks themselves, in a real emergency where commercial communication infrastructure goes down, in my mind there is very very little guaranty that high sites we use to build networks like HamWAN would stay up, that said, a group like this, with the knowledge and experience (and equipment) could set up an ad-hoc network in that situation that could prove much more fruitful to the situation at that time. Commercial infrastructure is not built for anything resembling worst case, most cell sites do not have a generator, microwave links can do strange things in earthquakes, and in any case, call attempts would spike greatly for both the wireline and wireless networks - causing both to temporarily at least have massive blocking problems - just look at the overload issues on the cellular networks during the Seahawks parade. Just some thoughts from newbie. Robert Johnson -- Gtalk/Jabber:aloha@blastpuppy.com AIM:AlohaWulf Yahoo:AlohaWulf Telephone:+1-562-286-4255 C*NET: 18219881 Email:aloha@blastpuppy.com Email:alohawolf@gmail.com -- "All of the problems of the world could be solved easily, if men were only willing to think." - Thomas J. Watson Sr. --