Justin, your idea of club members organizing gatherings themselves, rather than relying on the committee to arrange everything, is a good one and has worked in the past. Mike Perkins used to organize gatherings in the South West, some before the Owners Club even got started, and more recently Alan Donowho has organized meetings in the North East.
Richard Street is keen to get a Midas contingent going to some of the Mini shows in the Midlands and I hope that owners will support his initiative and join him at these shows. Apart from club members supporting these events by turning up, the club itself needs to find a way of supporting people like Richard. How? Well I think it comes down to a comment that Kelvin made:
kelvink wrote: The one thing that I don’t see from the club which I’d dearly love to see is this …. Where are people located? I’d love to be able to meet up with more people with Midas cars or in fact any kit or even just an interest in kits of any kind.
I don’t think Kelvin is asking for names, addresses, car registration and chassis numbers – information that the club used publish every year in the pre- data protection act era incidentally.
No I think what Kelvin is saying (and please correct me if I’m wrong Kelvin) is: “If I’m going to an event, or want to organize a gathering locally, how do I contact other owners to let them know about it?”
Perhaps there is some club database software available that will allow regional mailing lists, or email lists, to be generated and thereby allow any member wishing to organize something to spread the word.
Another thing that interested me in Kelvin’s posting was his reference to the MEV Owner’s Group:
We’ve never had a committee meeting as we have online discussions in sections of the forum which are only accessible by other forum moderators. It’s been quite busy of late there as Road Track Race recently went bust so there’s been a lot of work needing to be done to keep things running smoothly.
I’m interested to learn more about how it works. I don’t know why you would want to put the “committee” discussions in a section out of view of ordinary members. I’m sure that all the existing MOC committee members would agree that there is nothing secret at our meetings. In fact they are always open meetings where any MOC member is welcome to turn up. However, I can see there would be advantages to have a section where only designated members (moderators, committee officers, call them what you will) can post. That way you can avoid going off track with members discussing something that is not related to the main theme of the thread.
What I’m really interested in is when there is work needing to be done, how is it divided out? and how is it monitored to make sure that it is being done?
Again maybe there is some way of doing that online?
I have a few other thoughts, relating to that idea, that I will post up later, but returning to the ideas already posted here:
Both Mike and Neil (Mtrike and Benofbrum) talked about the Midas now being a classic car and how can the club support owners going forward. That is something that the club should certainly be doing and maybe that should be the topic of a separate thread. If anyone wants to get the ball rolling on that one please go ahead.
As Mike and David both point out, the club needs some new volunteers to get involved and help to run things and as Michael (cortezkeeper) points out, that isn’t necessarily as big a commitment as many might fear.
What I'm interested to learn is how new technology can be used to further reduce the time commitment for committee members. I know that David has had to put in a lot of hard work to get the membership database up to date and part of the reason for that was that the records had not been kept in a systematic fashion in the past. Now that they are up to date, I hope that the information can be kept up to date and used to help the club in the way I outlined above.
I think my vision for the future of the club is of a much larger committee, comprised of members from all around the country, where all the committee discussions are held online and the committee members only need to meet face to face when attending events. Furthermore, I would like to think that the time required to be devoted to club matters would be no more than many of us already spend posting on this forum.
I don’t know quite how this can be achieved and that is why I would like to hear from anyone who has relevant ideas, or experience, to contribute.