Practice for life

It's important to have a hobby. Neccessary for sanity in fact.

I've been fairly involved with the Orlando Jeep Club this past year. I took on the duties of club webmaster very early. This means that I had to attend board meetings.

The club is run as a non profit business, with a board of directors, and a panel of appointed positions. Only the directors can vote on decisions regarding the club, but the appointed positions are required to be at board meetings to take forth to the directors the sentiments of the membership, and to speak on behalf of committees that they may be involved in.

We've been having quite a lively argument lately over the structure of our club website. Some growing pains over the introduction of a forum. Forum moderation is something that the club is still getting used to. Initially this caused conflict between members who liked the old static web page, and the members who wanted modern public forums. It was almost like a culture clash. Th elong term members who have been in the club for many years have grown accustomed to the club being a social club. Dinners, barbeques, show-n-shines, etc. Many of the newer members are into going on trail rides or just hitting up the message forums.

Of course, being younger people, there was a fair amount of trash talking going on in the forums. Now i'm not saying that older more mature folks dont trash talk, but they tend to do it via more traditional means, such as telephones or face to face meetings. It made people uncomfortable, so we came very close to having the forums shut down only four months or so after it was created. Yet something wonderful was about to happen, made more special because it could have gone a lot worse.

A very active forum thread got started, where those who wanted to keep the forums argued back and forth with those who did not. There was a fair amount of negative comments here, and some incorrect arguments, but from this spawned some incredibly well written responses. Detailed, careful responses. It became letter writing in the classic sense. People carefully organized their thoughts and wrote them down for others to comment.

By the time we reached the board of directors meeting in which the fate of the forums was to be decided, everyone was fairly conversant in the issues at hand. Every single person that commented in that forum thread showed up, even a guy that lived hours away. There was so little bickering throughout the entire process, and we worked towards a compromise that we could all live with. The vice president made a comment to this effect, that he was very pleased at how we had all conducted ourselves. Point one for reasonable debate, even if on such a small scale.