On Jun 27, 8:55 am, Steve Bonine wrote:
wrote:
Should a membership organization not do what the membership wants?

Pardon my taking a single line from your article, but it's the topic I
want to discuss.

Works for me!

The first problem is figuring out "what the membership wants". What do
you do when the membership is split into approximately equal factions
with opposite opinions and both feel passionately that their position is
Right? Do you develop a position that pleases one faction and is
completely unacceptable to the other, or a compromise that no one agrees
with 100% but most folks can accept?

I say you do the latter. It's called consensus. Since there is no way
to give everyone everything they want, you work out a scheme that
gives everyone *some* of what they want.

And that's pretty much what ARRL has done.

But there's a couple of other steps. For one thing, it's important to
actively seek out what the membership wants. For another, it's
important to publish that information so that the membership and
others can see what the actual results are.

But the second problem is that "what the membership wants" may not be
the best course of action.

In whose judgement?

It is perhaps arrogant of the management of
an organization to think that they are more qualified to set a policy
than the members, but sometimes that's the case.

If so, then the management has to make their case to the membership.

The recent "regulation by bandwidth" fiasco is a clear example of how
*not* to do a proposal, IMHO. ARRL did a lot of things right, and the
proposal had lots of good points. But the BoD did not do a good job of
explaining the proposal, nor of getting widespread membership support
*before* submitting it to FCC. The end result was it got
overwhelmingly negative comments - mostly because 'phone ops don't
want wide data signals all over the 'phone subbands. Particularly
robot data signals.

Back in the 1960s the
ARRL lost a lot of support from their membership when they supported
incentive licensing; this seems to be a case of the organization doing
the opposite of "what the membership wants".

I was a ham back then, and it was a lot more complicated than that.

What happened was that, in 1963, the ARRL BoD proposed a return to the
pre-1953 system, which required an Advanced or Extra to operate 'phone
on the bands between 3 and 25 MHz. They claimed to have majority
support of their membership and the amateur community as a whole. And
perhaps they did.

But there was a vocal minority who loudly opposed the 1963 proposal.
There were also others who supported the *concept* but wanted a
different implementation. There were no less than 10 alternative
proposals that got RM numbers, comments, etc.

After several *years* of comments, arguments, proposals,
counterproposals, information and misinformation, FCC changed the
rules. The final rules changes bore little resemblance to the 1963
proposal from ARRL.

I suppose we'll be
debating forever whether the ARRL support for incentive licensing was
the Right Thing to do for the hobby, but I'm only trying to use it as an
illustration that there are cases in which a membership organization
does *not* set policy based on membership consensus.

Good example. Even if there was majority support for incentive
licensing, there wasn't a consensus.

Setting policy for a large national organization is a complex task. I
don't agree with everything that the ARRL does, but I don't expect to.
I suppose I have a mental threshold and as long as I agree with "enough"
of what the organization espouses, I'll continue to be a member.

Agreed.

The other aspect for the ARRL is that there's a Field Organization that
provides support for various aspects of the hobby. At various points in
my ham radio career, I have used that support structure and been a part
of it, adding to my enjoyment of the hobby. I find it a significant
disappointment that this organization does not exist in my current ARRL
section, and this may have more to do with whether I maintain my ARRL
membership than the organization's position on national issues.

One of the main problems with the Field Organization is that it's all
volunteers. If nobody steps up to those jobs, they go vacant.

Before someone says, "If you're upset that the ARRL Field Organization
is broken, why don't you fix it?", let me explain my position on that.
When I moved here, I did the same sorts of things that I've done on
other occasions in terms of getting involved in the local organizations.
It became quickly apparent that the ARRL officials at the section
level had no interest in actually *doing* anything. (There was one
exception, but with no support from the Section Manager, even that
individual was unable to accomplish much.) So where does this leave me?
I considered the option of trying to "fix" things, but it would
require many hours of work to accomplish anything. Ham radio is a
hobby, and I'm not inclined to invest that amount of effort into it. So
I have contented myself with helping at the local club level. Maybe
there are lots of other hams in this ARRL section who would like to see
an effective Field Organization, and if we all worked together it would
happen, but I have no way of knowing if that's the case.

That's the classic "bell the cat" problem facing any volunteer
organization.
My suggestion would be to take one small part of the Field
Organization and make it your own.

Out of curiousity - what is it that needs fixing in your section?

73 de Jim, N2EY