On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 1:50 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
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