[HamWAN PSDR] director responsibilities

[Robert Johnson]

Hiya!

I know I'm new around here, in fact this is my first email (my 
apologies, its a long one) to the group, I'd like to help, for what its 
worth, I'm an FSE for Ericsson.

I've also served on several non or not for profit boards, and I have 
some thoughts.

Good governance is really important, that said, you can do it without 
requiring approval for every expenditure, set a yearly budget (like for 
project or capital expenditures), don't allow money to be spent outside 
of those budgets without voting.

Nothing you can do will stop people of trust from violating that trust 
of the group - in short, locks keep honest people honest, all you can do 
is make sure you have good records to ensure that if they do violate 
that trust, you can nail them to a wall. We can perform good governance 
without making this all feel like work.

I would also suggest staggering the terms for the board in the future, 
so we don't run into a situation where we have no acting board because 
everyone termed out, there should always be enough of a board to have 
some quorum.

Lastly, an inline reply:

On 2/18/2014 10:22 AM, Nigel Vander Houwen wrote:
> Lastly, this is certainly a personal opinion, and I cannot speak for
> others, but we are in amateur radio as a hobby. We do it because it is
> enjoyable. It is not a job, and while we strive hard to provide the best
> service possible, it's too easily forgotten that we are ALL volunteers.
> Our time, our money, our expertise is freely given to the project
> because we enjoy doing so. Let's continue to do that, and not make it
> another job that we will never get paid for.

Exactly, make the hobby feel too much like work, and it becomes work.

EMCOMM is important, but it should work hand in hand with us doing this 
stuff for fun - meaning for me at least, if we can do EMCOMM and have 
fun, all the better, but doing either one at the exclusion of the other, 
is in my mind, wrong.

EMCOMM is merely one facet of Ham Radio as a hobby and again, in my 
opinion shouldn't be the be all, end all of anything we as radio 
amateurs do.

I'd argue the knowledge gained in building these networks is actually 
more useful in emergencies than the preexisting networks themselves, in 
a real emergency where commercial communication infrastructure goes 
down, in my mind there is very very little guaranty that high sites we 
use to build networks like HamWAN would stay up, that said, a group like 
this, with the knowledge and experience (and equipment) could set up an 
ad-hoc network in that situation that could prove much more fruitful to 
the situation at that time.

Commercial infrastructure is not built for anything resembling worst 
case, most cell sites do not have a generator, microwave links can do 
strange things in earthquakes, and in any case, call attempts would 
spike greatly for both the wireline and wireless networks - causing both 
to temporarily at least have massive blocking problems - just look at 
the overload issues on the cellular networks during the Seahawks parade.

Just some thoughts from newbie.

Robert Johnson
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