On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 1:50 PM, Kerry Raymond <[email protected]> wrote:
> My personal 10c on this having been a chapter member for several years > and a chapter committee member for some of those years is that there are > the chapters who get annual funding and those who don’t. If you don’t get > annual funding, then you have no staff member who can do the day-to-day > administrative work (every organisation has to submit forms to their > government, organise auditing, keep the web site updated, do the > bookkeeping, etc) so this work has to be farmed out to the members, which > means that sometimes you have nobody with the right skills > (responsibilities of treasurers make it a particularly difficult role to > fill) and that you use up all of people’s time and goodwill in doing the > day-to-day stuff instead of doing the exciting projects you hoped you’d be > doing as a chapter member. Contrary to what WMF think ,there is a lot of > work involved in writing grant applications and, when you are doing it with > lots of volunteers each with randoms skills and only a certain amount of > spare time, generally some people let you down (family issues, busy at > work, or maybe just don’t know how to write the section allocated to them) > and it doesn’t get finished to meet the deadline, which is then a waste of > the time of the people who did their share of the work. The net result is a > somewhat demoralising downward spiral with fewer members, burned-out > committee people, and fewer achievements. I’ve pretty much abandoned trying > to work chapter-wide and just try to do what I can in my own local area. > > > > WMF strongly pushes you to use volunteer time in a chapter, but overlooks > practical realities. Engagement with GLAMs almost always involves weekday > meetings; most volunteers are not available on weekdays due to their own > employment. I have 7 upcoming GLAM sessions in the next 3 weeks (all for > 1Lib1Ref) all on weekdays and despite my call for help to both chapter > members and the Australian noticeboard, nobody is volunteering; I guess I > am doing them all myself (assuming I don’t have conflicting commitments). > Even committee meetings are very hard to schedule across 4 time zones with > everyone with different working hours, different commitments to family > events etc on the weekends, and technology problems with phones/computers > often waste a lot of the meeting time (some people can’t get Hangouts to > work for them, other people’s microphones cut out randomly, etc). Our > chapter has never met face to face. > I've been approached several times to start/spearhead a national chapter and have declined for exactly these reasons. cheers stuart -- ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
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