Dear all

As a member of the SoA Council (but not an officer) I am happy to
respond on an individual basis to Sarah Flynn's comments, and those of
Richard Bond and others. I feel it would be unfortunate were this debate
to be taken as criticism of Simon and his team; the Society has a
website which looks pretty good and all for little cost, and the new
version looks still better than the old. There is a question as to how
much additional benefit would be gained unless a huge amount of money
were poured into a state-of-the-art site; those of us who have
commissioned professional web page designers know that they don't come
cheap. And at the end of the day, unless you have constant review and
updating, sites quickly get stale and out of date. The question is
whether the Society has the resources at all, and if so, is that the
priority use to which we would put those resources. We can hardly come
to a conclusion on the basis of the present discussion.  Council has had
to take some hard decisions on what to finance and what we can not
within present income levels. Here comes the archives version of the
prersent NHS debate: are those who want a fully professional (i.e. paid
for) approach to our website prepared to say 'don't spend on this...or
that', to free up resources, or are they prepared to pay more subs?

Secondly, I think that people should realise that this is a public list,
subscribed to by non-members, and it is in a sense a parallel universe
to the Society. If members have problems, queries, criticisms or
suggestions, and want a SoA response, rather than putting their point of
view up on the list, they should consider that the Society has its own
channels. Have they raised it at regional meetings, specialist group
meetings, written to the Hon Sec, lobbied one of the Council members? It
is unfair and inappropriate to expect our officers to make public
responses to members' comments when they are not directed through those
channels.

The listserv is read, I am sure, by the officers of SoA, and it
certainly allows me as a Council member to get a good feel for what the
burning issues of the day are. It is no good, however, just making
demands on the list; matters need to be fed in to the Society agenda, so
they can be discussed and decisions taken. If those who talk so strongly
about having a more sophisticated website contact the officers and
request that their views be given high priority for discussion on the
Society's agenda, I am sure the officers will take the matter forward.
If they didn't (and I can't imagine that they would not) then complain
to the non-office holding members of Council such as myself to ask that
the matter gets an airing, or raise it from the floor at the AGM.

If Sarah wants my view, as an individual member of Council, I can say
that I have a lot of sympathy with getting the very best web presence
that we can get. Having listened to both Simon's presentation at last
week's Council meeting and also the Treasurer's report and discussions
as to other requests for spending, I feel that there would have to be
some hard decisions as to cut backs in other areas in order to free up
resources for this. I am not sure that I could vote for major
expenditure on the website, over and above what has been allocated
already, should that be proposed, because I cannot think of an area of
Society expenditure I could agree with being cut back in order to
finance the work. If members have different priorities I would be happy
to support them, but that's a debate we have yet to have.

Gareth Haulfryn Williams

-----Original Message-----
From: Flynn, Sarah [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 07 December 2001 09:03
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Society website


Hello all
Now my personal contribution.
As I have said before (eg at the discussion at Conference this year on
the
Society's publications/website) I in no way wish to denigrate Simon
Wilson's
efforts and achievement over several years with the SoA website.  Nor do
I
wish to denigrate Matt Stephenson and the team who are stepping into his
shoes.  But...
I have much sympathy with the person who suggested that employment of a
professional web designer would be a good use of Society resources.  I
have
full sympathy with the views of those several members who feel that they
have not been asked about what the SoA spends its money on (perennial
point
re reading your SoA mailings and going to meetings borne in mind of
course)
and have felt personally for some time that members of Council or the
Executive Secretary could intervene on this list to give us information
in
these as in other matters without damaging their positions respectively
as
elected officers and a key employee of the Society.  I think we
sometimes
(often?) operate too much on a 'need to know' basis and not enough on a
'FoI' one in the SoA.
HOWEVER the point is that it is ongoing maintenance which makes or
breaks a
website, however professionally designed, technologically superior or
comprehensive it is at the outset.  I do not imagine that even if the
SoA
used our resources in what to me seems a sensible way, ie by using a
professional to design our website, those resources would stretch to
having
that professional on the permanent secretariat staff to deal with the
dribs
and drabs, however regular, of updating.  So volunteers such as Matt S
would
inevitably come in somewhere, despite the 'second level of bureaucracy'
(as
someone called it) and the tedious admin that entails.
Yours in a somewhat contradictory position
Sarah
and in pedant mode, ps for Richard B - don't think A2A is regional, it
covers the whole of England and includes national subject-based
projects.
Good for rhetorical tripartite sentence construction though, I
admit...;)
sjaf


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