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.