Membership
Another thing that came up at the last meeting is the question of what constitutes membership?
The Rules of the Bristol Wireless Community Co-Operative Ltd. state:
5. The Committee may admit to membership any person or corporate body, or nominee of any unincorporated organisation or firm, who or which is living, working or active within the community served by the co-operative and who or which has agreed to pay to the co-operative any subscription or other sum due in respect of membership.
In practice, this means virtually anybody including the ex-pat Psand lads.
For the purposes of meetings
24. …a quorum shall be one tenth of the members of the Co-operative or five members, whichever is the greater
so we just assumed that for the purposes of the last 2 meetings that everybody was a member thus making them quorate, however we are actually legally required to keep a formal register of membership (each paying £1 for a "share").
One suggestion might be that signing up for this BBS or the mailing list constitutes membership application and unless you hear otherwise (i.e get thrown off for spamming or abuse) sending a £1 either by mail or through Paypal to info@bristolwireless.net address confirms membership.
Discuss!
I think this would be a bad idea. Many people may quite legitimately want to take an interest in our activities without joining us. We could certainly allow applications by email, web form, text message or whatever and payment by paypal, credit card or cowrie shells but it should be an explicit request to become a member of the group and all applications should be reviewed and voted on at the next feasible meeting. IMHO.
+1
I also think that membership of the forum and CLAN list should be seperate from the co-op membership.
Also, collecting the membership money via paypal would be quite expensive as we would only get about 75p of the pound paid.
The register of members is supposed to have contact details included as well, so I suppose we don’t want it to be open access, such as putting it on the wiki. Or we don’t want it to be too open access anyway. I think certain organisations such as the Register of Friendly Societies, and the Inland Revenue can have access on demand, as can other members. Is there any reason why somebody wouldn’t want people to know they are a member of Bristol Wireless!
I take your point though, showing an interest in our forums probably shouldn’t result in co-option 🙂
A folder has turned up containing certificates and forms for membership details for members and directors, a meeting in the new year should be organised to sort out the relevant paperwork and subscriptions (£1). We won’t bring them along to the Xmas party cos someone will spill beer on them 😛