Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise

When I started setting up this new website, one of the several things I had on my mind was getting around a weakness of using Google Groups. That weakness is that it does not let you allow other club members to browse past discussions without opening that record up to the world at large.

For example, the RCQBS-Exec list has discussions that go on about executive meetings (agenda, minutes, committee reports, financial reports, etc) and about those decisions the executive makes about incidental things between meetings. The members of that list can browse the archives but no one else in our club can. If we add them to to our Exec list, they get everything we send and for the most part they wouldn't want that. The result is that we have lists that work well in their own groups, are private to the groups they serve and they are there as a record. Those are all good things. But the bad thing, and this is very bad, is that it means the important details of the workings of our club are not accessible to our members. The same thing applies to discussions of the various committees.

The new forums are intended to (mostly) replace the google groups. We have a forum for each of the old lists. The difference is that they can be read by everyone who is in the club (Members) and also by Friends of Rotary (members of other Rotary clubs we interact with, our DG, ADG, or even prospective members). And each of us can decide which forums we want to follow. We can set up an RSS feed so we have a way to check what has gone on in a particular forum when we choose to by going to something like a bookmark for that forum and tell the website to keep that list up to date. Or we can Subscribe to a particular forum (or any other part of the web site). That way we get email notification whenever anything is posted to the forum or part of the website we are interested in, including a link that takes you right to the new item.

Here is what I suggest.

If privacy within a particular group is necessary, have the discussion by sending your email to the old google groups mailing list for the committee you are dealing with. This is the method to use for a discussion that the rest of the club should not see. There should not be much need of that, if any.

But if your message is something that should be part of the record of our club, accessible to all of our members (this should be nearly everything, it should be the default) post it to the forum instead.

What do you think? Is this the right approach? Post a comment and let us know what you think!

KGW