On Wednesday 03 Sep 2003 3:00 pm, Steve Fosdick wrote:
I'd be interested to know why people are put off going to meetings that are far away from home.
Is it the cost, the time, the need to drive or some combination?
For myself, all of these factors combined: you have to be pretty keen to drive 100+ miles round trip.
It doesn't seem that many people do this. It's not the way to get larger meetings appealing to a wider cross-section of people.
Lift-sharing is OK in theory - I hope more people do it - but it's still not as convenient as making your own way to and from a local meeting.
I would be sad to see a situation where people were asked to decide which of two meetings to attend as I think it would encourage parochialism.
As long as they are not on the same day and not too close together geographically, I still don't see the problem with having more than one meeting in the same month.
It's only a potential problem for the small number of people who currently *are* willing to drive 100+ miles to attend every meeting and there are *very* few of those amongst us :-)
Most people don't drive long distances to meetings anyway. So there would be no need to 'decide' which meeting to go to if they are not likely to go to the distant meetings anyway.
For most people, I would think, having more meetings closer to where they live, that they are likely to be able to go to, is better than a few meetings which are also too far away to get to easily.
The plan with a three month rotation of Norwich, Syleham and another venue looks good to me.
This has generally been agreed as the current plan, starting from January. All the same, I would like to see more meetings eventually, for the reasons above.
Well, that is my opinion but I have accepted that I am 'over-ruled' and that the active list members prefer only one meeeting per month across the region.
Nevertheless it is all a bit 'shot in the dark' with no real information to make informed decisions. All we can do is discuss our own guesses and anecdotal evidence.
That is why I suggested that we at least *try* more frequent meetings for a year and then review the situation. Active research basically, 'suck it and see'. But I have to accept that the most active members don't agree :-)
Regards Syd