I've been giving this some more thought, and I've had a few very productive discussions with several volunteers for the Board in the last few days. Thanks to each of you.
I think the best way to approach this is to initially form the Board in an
advisory capacity and see how that works out. Once the Board gets itself up and functioning, then we can begin to gradually transfer more and more authority to the Board. I think this will eliminate many of the problems that plagued the HGAA's bootstrapping process.
Review of the HGAA ("Hang Gliding Association of America"):I think it might be helpful for us to learn from the mistakes of the HGAA. For those who don't know the history, I started that organization on hanggliding.org back in the spring of 2010. People began signing up and in a short time we had nearly 100 people ready to go. So we created a "Transition Team" to help move us from being a loose group into an actual organization. That's when the problems arose. Different people had different ideas about how to work together, and there was no authority to turn to when those different ideas conflicted with each other (actually, there was an agreed-upon authority, but one person with physical control of the web site decided to ignore that authority). The situation was worsened by people who I believe wanted to see the HGAA fail because it conflicted with their own power and control. Those people eventually ended up seizing control, and sure enough, they quickly dove it into the ground. In fact, when I last checked, the domain name "
hgaa.org" is now the "Hazel Grove Agricultural Association"!!
In retrospect, I think one of the problems with the founding of the HGAA was that I assumed that a group of loosely connected pilots with no experience working with each other (and quite likely very different agendas) could come quickly together to build an organization. That was obviously too optimistic, and the results are clear at
hgaa.org (now the "Hazel Grove Agricultural Association").
So I'd like to take it a little slower this time. I'd like to get the team working together without any authority at all to start with, so we don't have desperate "power plays" and the related strife. Let's get the board started as a "discussion group" about how to really build the organization. As the discussions mature, we'll get a better sense of how well we can work together without the pressure that we had in the HGAA. Little by little, the Board can take on more and more authority until it is fully self-sufficient.
Does anyone disagree with this approach?
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