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On the Left Side of the Road...
I do agree with you, that this is a good Idea. In years past, the BOD had attempted this, and was meet with very little support from the General Membership. Hopefully with the sport maturing, this will change, and more would be willing to help. Thank you Mike for Stepping up, and offering to help.
Indeed a great idea. It would work very well with the idea I posted in your outreach thread.
Re-posting here for reference:
We could organize a forum thread specifically for those seeking help with local community events/projects/working with land managers etc to come for getting help.Your proposed volunteer committee could be ‘responsible’ for monitoring this “call for help” message board and bridging the gap between those in need and those that may be able to help.
It would be worth exploring this further to see if there is interest in forming a volunteer committee.
I also see how this idea has merit and is worthy of deliberating on when the BOD meets. As the general membership continues to grow and finds out that getting involved with the WGA involves more that hiding and seeking caches, the more advocacy we will have. If those in the know can help reach the general public about the benefits of the organization and the sport itself, we find ourselves in a win-win situation. If the government offices need a Point of Contact, even if it is just to get the question or concern to the BOD, the more willing they may be to open dialogue.
There are a lot of people out there that have skills that would be beneficial for the WGA to utilize if those individuals will volunteer.
Disclaimer : Always answering to a higher power.
I could see where this is beneficial to geocaching in general. As long as the WGA would have materials available for these “outreach” members to help explain geocaching.
I know from experience that working with local governments can be overwhelming. A boost in the right direction can go along way
A proposed goal or “mission statement” of a newly formed volunteer committee might be: To monitor requests for local volunteers and solicit other WGA members to help/volunteer in their part of the state to assist with requests for WGA member assistance at the local level.
This is of course just a draft and would require input from many to exactly identify the proposed resulting committee.
In addition to watching a proposed general “I need help organizing…” message board area, the volunteering member of the committee could watch their local regional area’s forum as well because calls for help come in there as well.
Also, if there was an “official” committee, general members would know who to contact if they are asked for help (like forwarding to the “level 2 support” if you’ve ever called for technical support on anything) or need help with something they would like to organize, present, teach or whatever.
The picnic and camp-out (and other official WGA events) could still be managed by event-specific committee’s and would not necessarily be something the volunteer committee would be concerned with. Certainly anyone would be welcome to volunteer for either or both committees! 😀
I wanted to post this just to propose how this new committee ‘could’ interact with the other committees and to continue to help foster the idea a little more. It’s definitely an idea worth discussing both on the open WGA forums as well as at the next BOD meeting (hoping I can be a part of both!)
Even without the formation of a commitee, a list of contacts by region or area would be a great benifit. While -cheeto-‘s suggestion of a “I need help organizing…” forum would work for WGA members, a non-member would have to jump through a few hoops to get in touch with someone.
I think a simple list including email addresses is a bad idea. I would think it should be possible for a non-member to click a link and send a message to a local volunteer (ala PMs) without exposing the volunteer’s email address. I don’t know all of the functionality if the software for the website, so perhaps Jeremy could say if this is even possible.
I think you are on the right track here. We currently have a Community Education Committee, which is charged with both handling these “come put on a geocaching demonstration” requests and also dealing with parks departments, police departments, etc. I think this structure is too much for one committee and should be split. Additionally, for both groups, I think we need to actively recruit members for each region and make certain we have folks available to do presentations, as needed. Of course, that is easy to say, but not so easy to accomplish.
Looking back, this topic should probably be moved to the “suggestion box” area. It’s not really a question. Could the admin do this?
@Team Deejay wrote:
We currently have a Community Education Committee, which is charged with both handling these “come put on a geocaching demonstration” requests and also dealing with parks departments, police departments, etc. I think this structure is too much for one committee and should be split.
This jogged my memory and I recall that I was asked to be on this committee, and when I look at the list of motions passed by the BOD last April, I see I am actually on it! 😯 I had forgotten about this and have never been contacted to do anything, perhaps because there has been no need in my area. Volunteers apparently also do not have access to the Community Education forum, or at least I can’t get in there.
So I guess although I understand the mission I’m not really sure what this committee does or whether my suggestion might be redundant.
On the Left Side of the Road...Moved this topic to the Suggestion Box forum at the request of gotta_run.
At one time the Board considered both maintaining a list of volunteer presenters by region, as well as creating an online system for submitting and tracking requests for presenters. I think I still have the preliminary designs for these two things sitting around somewhere.
However, at the time (2007?) it was felt that we didn’t get enough requests to justify creating these tools, and handling these requests informally (via asking for help in the forums) would be OK. But it appears in some cases that this informal handling has not worked well and things have slipped through the cracks…
@jeremy wrote:
At one time the Board considered both maintaining a list of volunteer presenters by region, as well as creating an online system for submitting and tracking requests for presenters. I think I still have the preliminary designs for these two things sitting around somewhere.
I guess I am not thinking of anything overly complicated here because the incidence of requests is not that great. In fact, I am basically envisioning a “list of people,” so that when a question gets posted to the forums requesting help in Anytown, WI, we have a designated person handling Anytown who can be assigned the request, rather than waiting for someone to pick it up off the forums. I guess there is a question about how a request would get made and some diligence needed to identify these requests or potential opportunities.
Perhaps this could simply be an extension of what the Community Education committee already does and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Outside its general mission, I’m not quite sure what the committee does, because, as I mentioned, even though I’ve apparently been on it for nearly a year, I’ve haven’t been contacted about any needs (which may itself point to a lack of need for this whole idea!), and I don’t have access to the committee forum. In other words, perhaps the limited resources of the association should not be spent on this effort if there is little need and, therefore, little opportunity for benefit or return.
On the Left Side of the Road...To help you with this mission, I’d like to see a separate “Volunteer Opportunities” Topic that would appear perhaps after the General and Announcement Topics. That way, they’d at least be in one spot.
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