As you know, we have a meeting coming up on 5 October and we have a great range of interesting speakers. There are also a few small things that we just want to discuss very briefly with the members.  I wanted to highlight one of these small things before we meet:

The steering committee would like to raise with the members whether funds should invested in getting a forum set up – as an extra facility for members to raise questions and share information.

At the moment we have this blog facility – and the Facebook page.  

If we, as a group, want to have a forum then we would have to download additional software and then upgrade the website so that this software is supported.  At present we pay £7 per month for the current level of service. This would need to increase to £20 per month (at current rates).  So, an increase from £84 per year to £240.  The plug in forum software was not highlighting a price to me (when I was starting to investigate) – so it may not have a charge/significant charge.

It would be good to get some feedback at the meeting on whether this is something that members want – or not.  It would also be useful to know at our meeting whether you use the Facebook page, to get some idea of the percentage of our membership that uses that social media site.  We can probably deal with this by a simple show of hands.  

If we didn’t go down the route of a forum, perhaps there would be some enthusiasm for using our current blog post in a different way?  At the moment it has feature articles and notice of meetings (both ours and others).  Would others be prepared to post questions?  We could use the existing (very cheap) comments section to get answers.

This leads to a wider point – what should our funds be spent on?  Some suggestions have been made but are there unexpressed views?

If you can’t make the meeting Saturday but have views please do email me at website@carmartheshiremeadows.com 

Hope to see you Saturday.  Rachel