Dear Association Leader

There is the story of a college student who blasted her hometown on the web. The principal of her high school found it and gave it to the local newspaper who published it as a ‘letter to the editor’ and the result was that the student’s father went out of business. What could she do?

Slashdot takes a look at the case in Of Catty Rants and Copyrights and finds that the situation is not clear.

I think the lesson here is that even though many Internet copyright controversies depend on what is protected under “fair use,” that is much less clearly defined than one might hope. If someone blatantly lifts content from your home page and posts it on their own website for commercial gain, that’s a copyright violation, but what if they only post excerpts for the purpose of “commenting” on it? What if you posted something snarky on your blog, and later took it down, but someone else archived a copy on their blog in order to show the world what a dick they thought you were? You may not know offhand whether these actions are protected under “fair use,” but it would be nice to think that the answer exists, and that a lawyer could steer you towards it. No such luck in some situations.
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Prior to a court ruling, “the law” is just defined as the consensus among legal experts on how to interpret a statute. So if experts are divided on a given question, then by definition there is no consensus and hence no “law,” so what are they arguing about?

Next time you think something is cut and dried and simply obvious, take a step back. It may not be and your best decision may depend upon understanding the odds of others seeing it the way you do.

Do you get dismayed when your membership drops, when you have an under-attended event, or when you can’t seem to generate any interest in your organization’s activities? John Graham-Cumming says If you build it, they will ignore it — unless you promote it.

In many ways the hard part comes after you’ve created something.
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What matters is promotion. I wrote it, it doesn’t mean people will buy it. And the main reason they won’t buy it is they’ve never heard of it.
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If you’ve made the effort to create something, make the effort to promote it.
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It was a lot of work to make those things happen, but the only way to make a creative work successful is for people to hear about it.
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It’s not enough to create, you have to market.

The approach to take is that participation in your organization and its affairs is a measure of how effective you are in communicating its message and activities. If you aren’t getting the participation you want it means you are not being effective in getting the right word out in the right way. People aren’t hearing you so what you need to do is to find another way to communicate with them. That is promotion and marketing.

Small Business Trends provides A Quick Refresher of CAN-SPAM Rules for Email Marketing and Newsletters.

The point of the rules is to keep us from misleading people, to ensure that we are easy to find if someone has a problem or just needs to find us, and to make it easy for people to escape from our clutches whenever they want to.
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To be honest, it is much easier to simply arrange your newsletters to comply with the CAN-SPAM regulations than it would be to wade through those regulations to figure out whether your newsletter has to comply or not.

The four basic requirements are that the e-mail message subject line is not misleading, that there is no attempt to disguise the identity of the sender, that there is a physical post office mailing address in the body of the message, and there is an opt-out mechanism honored within ten days of a recipient requesting to no longer receive your e-mail.

Nonprofit or no, organization business or no, it is still a good idea to make sure that all of your organization’s email to multiple addresses complies with these rules.

The idea is that modern communications technologies and computers allow people to work together at a distance. They can telecommute and use the I’net rather than burn gas to get to a common workplace. Jonathan Weber considers this idea Virtual Insanity and explains why he thinks telecommuting is tough for small companies. The ideas are especially pertinent for those organizations that do not have an established work place and depend upon volunteers.

Years of experience with far-flung organizations have taught me more about the limits of telecommuting than about its advantages. I firmly believe that you should expect employees to show up for work, whenever possible, no matter what kind of company.

The reasons for this have nothing to do with checking that people are actually working. It’s about efficient communications, building company culture and camaraderie, and sharing the daily bits of work and personal experiences that create a shared sense of purpose.

A team is not just a collection of parts. They have to fit together and work together to become a unified working group. Telecommuting tends towards the assembly of a collection of parts. A common workplace with team members working with each other directly and in person is more likely to form that unified working group.

Scott Adams has a nice list of reasons that teamwork might inhibit individual peak performance. The basics are that other people are involved and you have to work with them. That takes time, attention, and effort from each individual on the team.

Check it out!

What do you think of your team members? When you delegate a task, how do you trust that it will get done?

Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir has good advice on these questions in Does ‘judge favorably’ have limitations?

A key is that trust goes both ways. “The rabbis taught: one who judges others favorably, others will judge him favorably.” … “On the other hand, one is permitted to take reasonable precautions towards a suspicious figure, even as one judges him favorably.”

When you place trust in another, such as in delegating some task, you should also place trust both in your judgment in selection and assignment and also in the person to who you delegate the task. That does not mean that you just pass along the directive and forget about it.

Before you trust another, set the field. Do your part to make sure the proper tools and controls are in place and the process is properly managed. As the task gets done provide appropriate feedback. If there is fault, don’t just assume negligence or malignant behavior.

Yes, actions have consequences. Just don’t forget that you are a part of those actions and had some input into avoiding unpleasant results. Think of others the way you’d have them think of you as your starting point.

The Guru’s Handbook takes a look at how we look at our flaws and what that means to us and others.

In our lives there are many wagons to fall off of, many resolutions to make and break, many ways to see ourselves as failures. As teachers, we want our students to see the best of what we are, not the worst, so we hide our weaknesses where we can. But this is monochrome thinking, to divide ourselves into strong and weak parts, and when we see ourselves so simply we miss the chance to demonstrate resilience and grace, to give our students perspective that may serve them in their own trials.

Being a leader does not mean you have to be perfect, it means helping others get a job done. Often than can be achieved by a manner of acceptance that is not blinding but rather enlightening.

Bill Buxton took the example of engineers and designers in On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter to harangue the problem of appreciating the expertise needed for getting the job done. It is a common problem in many organizations where the software on modern computers can provide tools to easily fake expertise up to a point. A taxonomy is offered to help understand that expertise isn’t what you get from a can - or a software application.

None of this is to suggest that it is not worth your time to build up your knowledge of design. To help guide you in your approach, it might be useful to think of design in terms of four layers, each demanding a progressively larger investment.

First is awareness. This is the process of accepting the idea that an expertise might be applicable, that knowledge and skill can offer something their absence cannot.

Second is literacy. This is understanding some of the terminology and basic concepts of a technology or skill field.

Third is thinking. This requires experience to be able to see things how a true expert sees them.

Fourth is practice, the kind you get with full time involvement where you can synthesize concepts and express expertise independently.

No matter what you want your organization to do - website, newsletters, mailings, advertising - there is an expertise. You will have better success no matter your budget or resources if you at least recognize that an appreciation for expertise is needed.

K9JY has a few good ideas for his radio club that might be worth thinking about for yours.

Club Management — The meeting after the meeting notes that meetings are often social events and this is especially true for BOF (birds of a feather) organizations like radio or rv clubs. “If we take this social event approach to the meeting, one tries to maximize the social time around the business and program portions of the meeting.” Give people a chance to have a ‘meeting’ after the meeting and arrange things to facilitate social interactions and informal discussion groups.

Club Management — running a meeting - “Here’s the rule: the membership meeting isn’t about the meeting. It is about socializing with your fellow hams and learning about the hobby.” Get the business done but don’t dwell on it. Keep the focus on what your organization is all about (and it is not itself).

Club Management — the role of Boards and Members - “there is a world of difference between having a Board concentrate on the financial, membership, and program welfare of the club and having every nuance of running the club discussed and voted on at membership meetings. … let the Board run the club while the members enjoy the benefit of their hard work.”

Check it out! Think it out!

Bruce Eckel calls them Open Spaces Conferences
. BusinessWeek thinks Unconferences is the term.

Unconferences turn the plodding, predictable business gathering inside out. They’re a hybrid of a teach-in and a jam session, with a little show-and-tell mixed in, and they are attracting hundreds in cities like Austin, Tex., Bangalore, San Francisco, Sydney, and Tokyo. Unlike traditional, $1,000-a-head and up conferences, they’re totally unstructured—the agenda isn’t determined until the opening day of the event. Everyone who shows up is a potential speaker, and those who don’t speak contribute by posting photos, blog entries, podcasts, and video clips of the proceedings. Neckties and heels are noticeably absent. And attendance is almost always inexpensive or free.

The Fundamental “Rules” of the sessions that happen during OpenSpace conferences are:

• Whoever shows up is the right group
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over.

Putting together an event like this is a leap of faith. It is like planting a seed in the garden in hopes of a good yield. Like any good garden, your success will be in properly preparing the field. You will need to figure out how to get ‘birds of a feather’ together with a theme or central topic to stimulate attendance and participation. You will need a structure and an infrastructure that will facilitate the event happening. The most difficult kind of planning is that which results in not appearing to having any while still achieving success. That is the challenge this sort of event places on its organizers.