[RVRC] Note to the membership on the RVRC reflector

[drew Moore]

Members,

For those of you who remember there was a time when we had no way to
communicate via separate forum information of concern to the membership.
Believe it or not if someone wanted to send information to every member of
the club the email would be sent to me and I would find a way to disseminate
the message out including generated responses. This included information
from members, The ARRL, and unlimited areas of interest. The only
restriction was jokes whether appropriate or not. N2GJ and K2VHW did manage
to always slip in a few ham related cartoons. 

I would use separate mailing list so as not to trigger any spam measures
imposed by my ISP (CableVision). In the end the message got out responses
and all and if anyone wanted to direct information to the club you would
often hear send it to Drew. In addition to the separate email list I kept
separate list for different types of club memberships (Regular/Associate).
This has evolved and thankfully I'm out of the loop. I also created the
www.w2qw.org club website. I didn't do this because I didn't have a life or
I wanted to be popular, quite the contrary.

I create these vehicles to facilitate my ability to do my job as Secretary
of RVRC for the 15 years that I served supporting the club. Making club
documents available online to include copies of the last 2 years of meeting
minutes always made my job easier and put information club members needed
from time to time easily accessible. If you ever spent hours licking stamps
and folding material to be mailed and included SASEs you know what I'm
referring to. Two stamps to send a ballot out and the manual effort really
was unnecessary to acquire voting results from every eligible voter, but it
was important. Today the By-laws process for counting ballots is only
accurate up to the point the ballots are sent out. Anyways, Not to drift too
far, my use of digital tools to communicate to the membership and them to
freely communicate with each other is in place. Sometimes it pushes the edge
when issues get controversial, but it's the voice of the club. The website
also provides a central reference point for publicizing information about
RVRC and the RVRC repeater network. Our hosting service shows that many
people visit our site just to find out information about the club. It could
be our events, VE Sessions, Hamfest, etc. With the website members can
always use it as a source of reference to potential members, and the
secretary can continue to use it to inform the membership about club
documents, member roster, project underway and projects planned. It's always
been that way and it's always open to member contribution in subject matter
material.

Finally, when using the RVRC mailman reflector please keep in mind it's for
our members only. It's not intended to be a sounding board but a venue where
members should be encouraged to share information and ask question about
whatever goes on in the club they support. Replying to a message sends your
reply ONLY to the message originator, not the membership in general. Using
the reply-all will send your message to anyone shown in the To: and CC:
boxes. If you really wanted to send your message to the entire club the
safest way to address your email is to enter in the To: area
rvrc at mailman.qth.net or any other alias you may have set up in your contact
list. If you want to have any replies automatically sent to a specific email
address you can't instruct your email application to "send replies to". You
would have to do as Craig has instructed and request they use a specific
address. Otherwise, the reflector get very confused.

As our club president said 2 weeks ago nothing is decided by email in this
club. Voting is done at the club meeting, so in the absence of a By-laws
re-write a response to a survey should not be binding until it has been
ratified by a vote at an official RVRC Business meeting.

I hope everyone has a happy Saint Patrick's Day.

73,
Drew