90p Admin

We had a group hangout tonight with: Peter Wolf Jim Woodhead Robert Wood Wayne Schulz What we talked about is: Overall the feeling is that trying to position the group my convincing 20+ members to all agree on a common set of ideas is probably an exercise in frustration. What we think will work is to have a management group determine the basic goals of the group and then carry them out. - Create a more formalized set of ideas about what people want to get out of the group and what the group expects from people. - Have the people in this admin group who volunteer serve as leaders for specific areas. Some of the things we think would be needed (but first we should develop list of what we want/expect from group participation ) . We would need to first find out who in this group of 6 would want to volunteer on the management committee (for lack of a better description). What this would require is you take responsibility for an assigned area of the group. These areas might be... - Create knowledgebase - Recruitment - Member get together/training - Finances - Online communications - Create an annual fee - possibly also a fee (smaller) for new recruits which isn't refundable. This would help us cull out those members who have gone dormant. We're not talking about a lot of money - just enough to cover expenses and probably cover training costs for us to all get together (pay the trainer to attend). - Adding more members that are like us -- a. Experienced b. Contribute regularly (at least twice weekly) c. Add value through their contributions - Drop members who are not contributing --- or for people who have good contributions but limited amounts of time move them to a class of membership with no veto rights when new members enter as well as make them subject to the new fee that we'd all kick in. - Create a separate member only knowledgebase of tech info (this would likely be mostly upgrade related and new bugs discovered - no need to recreate the Sage KB). - Other general ideas. - We'd like to have another hangout of no more than an hour to discus the list of what people want to get out of the group / what the group expects of them.

I think it all stems from your last comment. What can *you* expect from the group and what does the group expect from *you*? If we answer that, the group membership, participation level, fees, etc. will start to sort itself out over time.