While I agree that debate in a chat room is most often not productive, and I know that arguing with a closed mind is like trying to teach a pig to fly, when we ignore the chat room threads and do absolutely nothing in response, there is a group that believes what they read. Perhaps once we posted the complete story on our web site, we could just drop a short response into these threads that says something like "if you want to read the ARRL response, go here: (URL of the ARRL story)." That gives the readers who actually have an open mind another opinion (or in many cases the **facts**) for consideration without requiring the poster (such as a director or vice director) to write a bullet-proof and error-free response. -- Andy Oppel, N6AJO At 01:10 PM 4/28/2007, Joel Harrison wrote:

I believe the support is there as well, Karl.

I base that on the fact that it is not an issue (or at least hasn't been yet to date) at hamfests, conventions and club meetings where you can talk to people face to face about it. It will be interesting to see the comments at Dayton in a few weeks.

There are only a handful of agitators that hide in a dark corner in their house behind their computer screen that are League bashers and opposed to anything we propose, regardless of the topic, that have an avenue via the chat rooms to spew their venom.

I have no problem whatsoever with people offering different opinions or suggestions. I welcome it. It provides healthy debate and makes our proposals better. The group I'm referring to, unfortunately, does not want to provide anything constructive and in no way can we obtain any positive results by debating them via the chat rooms. During the recent ODV emails about "communicating better" with our members this was suggested, but it just won't work. It would require a full time effort and would do no good. I can relate several examples over the past few weeks of hams I've engaged with email discussion from the chat rooms and it turned in to an endless loop and a couple have even turned vicious. Dave is still engaged with one guy that just won't accept there is a difference of opinion.

Someone suggested that Jim Haynie had productively engaged the chat rooms, but that sure wasn't Jim's assessment of the effort. Jim concluded it was wasted time because the group did not want to reach any conclusions whatsoever, they just wanted to argue. Jim felt it was much better to use or own media to get our message out effectively to our members and non-members alike. I agree with him. Our website alone averages 500,000 unique visitors per month.....that's huge and tells us something about the power of our website!

I know there has been some comment from within that we do not do a good job of communicating with our members. I will be the first to say we can always do better and should strive to that end. That just doesn't fall on the HQ staff via QST, ARRLWeb, the ARRL Letter, etc, but with each and every one of us as well. Each of the Officers, Directors and Vice Directors is required and has an obligation to stay in touch with the members in their division. Some do an outstanding job, some do a good job but unfortunately there are a few who don't communicate with the members at all. The process of doing better has to start with us.

I look forward to working with each of you in the coming months to improve this process.

On May 9 Dave, Chris, Paul and I will meet to put together a draft plan for moving forward with this matter. I then want the Officer's to review the plan and make any revisions, etc. We will then forward it to the Directors and Vice Directors for review several weeks before the July board meeting for discussion leading into the board meeting where we will decide our next move. As we move forward with this process, please engage your members and educate them about this topic. You can't commit to any specific course of future action obviously, as that won't be decided until July when the Directors will make the final decision, but you obviously can express your own position.

More later as we move forward.

73 Joel W5ZN

-----Original Message----- From: Karl Bullock [mailto:karl@bullock.org] Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 11:12 AM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:15485] Interesting Poll on 11306

There's an interesting poll on arnewsline.org where visitors are asked to vote in favor of or in opposition to Regulation by Bandwidth. Currently it's running nearly 2:1 in favor with nearly 1100 voting. Scientific? No. Interesting? I thought so.

I think the support is there once we redo this proposal and keep it, this time, from being demagogued to death!

73, Karl, WA5TMC

-------------------------------------- "Of, By, and For..." - Not just words! Karl Bullock, WA5TMC ARRL Vice Director - Delta Division 321 CR 458 Ripley, MS 38663 662 512-8053

Andy Oppel andy@andyoppel.com andy_oppel@alamedanet.net