[deerslayer]

Most clubs have meetings, monthly being perhaps the typical frequency. At this time, many of our clubs will have increasingly difficult issues to deal with. Field status, maintenance issues, ongoing costs, fees, to name a few.

At the same time, many (most?) Members are either quarantined or otherwise unable or unwilling to attend a group meeting. It may even become prohibited to have such a gathering.

The MAAC Board holds their meetings virtually. This has apparently been working well for several years.

Are any clubs now running, or planning to run, virtual meetings? If so, what are you using and how are you doing it?

[Max]

We cancelled our March meeting that was scheduled for last week.
We'll probably do a Zoom (online) meeting for our April meeting.

My wife also uses Zoom for her work. They use the video meeting feature in Zoom.
Working from home last week, she had 96 clients on ONE meeting. Seemed to work fine for her running the meeting on our home internet service.

[deerslayer]

Max -
Our March meeting, like yours, was cancelled due to this situation.

I have only briefly looked into this, from personal curiousity.

Zoom is one of the first that I came across. As with much of what I do, Open Source, free, or semi-free (also known as cheap) always appeals to me.

Let's say we have a club of 70 to 100 members, where a typical meeting attracts around 30 of these in person. If it was easy to just go online, this number of attendees might even increase significantly, to perhaps 50 or so. The typical business meeting can be held within 45 minutes. This seems to fit within the free option for Zoom. I suspect that this would also more than cover the situation at most clubs.

Please share your experience with this. Hopefully, others are also looking into it, or already have use it.

[Daren71]

We’ve done most of our meetings via email, it seems to work ok for most issues so far. Peel Region cancelled our March indoor flying, and I suspect April will be cancelled shortly.

Daren

[my1stflight]

Another option for communicating is using discord to do virtual meetings, very east setup.

[deaconFlyer]

Not to rock the boat ... but if you have a loosely organised club, you might be able to get away with a meeting in almost any format. You really have to look at your constitution / bylaws if your club is more developed and has those available. If you have bylaws (or even written policies) you are bound by those restrictions.

It is never an easy answer. So many organizations are coming up on AMM/AGM situations that are mandated by law and cannot take place in any other format other then in-person. Others even have time restrictions in their bylaws and must meet no later then a certain date. Some boards have absolute power, some have almost no power.

At times like this I always refer to the purpose of a meeting ... "to protect the rights of the minority to be heard". If everyone knows what is going on, why it is going on (and when it is going on) AND you are not restricted to in-person formats, you are probably gold.