[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Hi,Just FYI: For anyone not aware, Henry is an experienced independent financial advisor. He's helped me in the past and is helping my family with some of their matters. He generally knows how money things work and also understands the wizardry behind pivot tables in a spreadsheet....
On clubs, membership and so on...My experience in these things is that once things get formalised a lot of the fun leaves. As well as dealing with the financials, there then become issues with the day to day running and I've seen long-term friendships lost because of this. Enemies made, allegiances forged and clubs ending up run into the ground. A local example to me is a "Mans Shed" in a neighbouring town - they have fantastic premises with an engineering department (lathes, wending, etc.) as well as soft maker facilities - woodwork, fabrics, etc. and a dabble of electronics - but they're on the brink of collapse as no-one wants to volunteer to take over secretary and finance positions...
Other hack/make type spaces "local" to me charge a monthly subscription - Edinburgh is £35 a month... Newcastle much less. Bristol is £15....
Also, while I'm distant now, it's easy for me to simply not care, but I did enjoy the meetings we had - more so when it moved to a sort of non purely Linux setup with Pi, etc. How can you more formalise that? I was happy to pay the Library fees when we met there - I think it was something like a tenner a month. Not going to break my bank at those sort of prices.
On-going things like domains, hosting, and so on. These can be as cheap as you want - currently I pay £6 a year per .co.uk domain I register - I run my own VPSs so web hosting is relatively cheap, but the cheapest usable (and reputable) VPS that I'd use is under a tenner a month - then it's the cost of someones time and energy to maintain a website and run a mailing list.
And on communication - IMO there are far too many communication channels now. Mastodon, Github (yes), YouTube (yes), Discord, Discourse, IRC, email, Eks, Bluesky, USENET (is still alive), then the BBS and their variants - phpBB and many 100s more - then there are the (mostly) broken gateways between them. Ye ghods - who has time to login to the all? Not me. It's email and ... well right now nothing else because I simply can't be bothered. Lifes too short.
I think I did host the DCGLUG site for a while (memory is vague) I also remember looking at the stats - like 10 hits a week or something. What are the current stats?
Sadly I've seen this elsewhere too - once upon a time (1992 to be exact) I ran a mailing list for UK SCUBA divers - called NDG - Network Divers Group. This span-off a separate chat list, scuba-uk. It was great. 1000s of members, chatting about diving, arranging meetups and so on... Then came the popularisation of the WWW. Forums sprang up and fragmentation happened. More and more people wanted to run their own thing - and that was fine, but also detrimental to the other channels. scuba-uk and ndg closed in the late 90s and by then there were dozens of web forums and it was just too hard to keep track of who's who and whee they are. I know I'm not the only one who lost out to meet-ups, diving expeditions, etc. because of that.
History repeats itself. Everyone wants to be their own manager and run their own empire - good luck to you. Fragmentation happens, cliques are formed and disbanded. The Rule of Two Feet applies even if the others don't agree.
Where does that leave things? Mailing lists are hard to run. Battling with the big email players who impose their own rules and change them on a whim, spam/scam/uce/etc. and so on take time and expertise to manage.
If I were doing it for the group, I'd setup a "buy me a coffee" page and hope I'd get - well enough for a high street coffee + cake and maybe a fish supper every couple of months. Same for managing a server of some sorts (but not the actual content - others can argue over that!)
And then content - in todays GDPR and child protection world who knows.... (And in that context, I work with children - I have safeguarding qualifications as well as first aid and manual handling training - I'm probably in the worst possible scenario you can imagine.... I'm an in-water swim teacher. Try to not imagine.
And on that note, I'll leave you all to work out what next.I will be in Devon later this week, but it's going to be a somewhat hectic few days sorting out some old family shenanigans...
Good luck! Gordon
-- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/