Re: Re: November/December

Regarding AGMs, it is difficult for a variety of reasons. I speak as someone who has only been a club member for five years, but I do speak to ‘the management’ quite a lot and have heard the issues rehearsed a lot. One matter that we tend not to dwell on, as it can sound a bit ‘us and them’ is that there is a geographical skew towards the South in terms of where the members live. So, do you hold the AGM in, say, Manchester in order to show that we are not South-centric, only to find that even less people turn up than normal (whatever that is). I agree that people tend to think what’s the point in going along to some stuffy meeting where we will all agree with each other and waste half a day (or more, given travelling time). But this year’s AGM was really different.

Cleve got through all the b******s quite quickly and then opened the meeting up for comments, questions, suggestions. It went on for nearly two hours and I’d say the formal bit took up thirty minutes at most. There was a lot of good debating and, if you’ve read the latest FP, I took away the fact that the members who were there said they are comfortable with using the web and suggested that it’s ‘safe’ to put more stuff up on our site instead of in FP. That’s why I kicked off the TOC Tech articles going onto the web site from now on. In fact, this weekend I’m hoping to get more of them off to Mick P and to advise which new ones are up there in the next FP.

Assuming the AGM stays as open as this in future, it will allow me to get on with modernising the way we communicate with each other. Up until now I’ve been ‘advised’ that there are still a lot of older members who refuse to use the internet, so I had to make sure no one was ‘left behind’, which meant everything had to go through FP. But, the members at the AGM said, just get on with it. So, as far as I’m concerned, if you don’t turn up at the AGM and make your point(s) then whatever is decided there is what we’ll do. We also have to remember that many members are also members of other clubs (not necessarily car clubs) and they may be active in those, more than they are in the TOC.

I’m a member of several clubs, but I’m just a passenger and don’t go to AGMs, as I’m already committed to an active membership of the TOC. But, at the end of the day, there’s no escaping the fact that we have approximately 5% of members (10% if you include members like us who live all over the place, including France, but do take part via the web) who take an active role in the club and the rest just nod along. Maybe this is the norm? No one collects this data, so there are probably little clubs all over the UK with the same ratio of active to passive members?