Friday, great post! Thank you.
Ian, the reason I personally find your behaviour annoying is because you constantly hijack threads to promote yourself. Yes, your recruitment cost of $40-60 per member (not counting member donations) is pretty good. Maybe we should try some other libertarian talk shows. But there are also a lot of people who never listen to talk radio. Diverse outreach efforts are a good thing.
CP Ridgerunner, could you please just quote the relevant bit of text? There is no reason to use 20k of bandwidth to say "yes, I agree".
Re: The Underground forum, it has lots of communication, but it is, at its core, a clique; an insiders club, consisting more of inside jokes and back patting than actual signal. Digging through all the muck to find out what is going on is like reading slashdot at -1 threshhold. Over here in the FSP forum, we get a little bit of news and a whole lot of philosophical debate. Neither is especially rewarding.
Finally, the conversations are most unhindered if they are private. If people worry about curbing their discussion due to it being public that could be a bad thing.
I strongly disagree. FSP leadership should operate with complete transparency, like any decent non-profit.
Elections didn't work out very well. Very few people voted overall which showed an overall lack of interest. Drawing in people who have shown dedication and good judgment seemed to work best.
Again, I disagree. I don't think its worked out well at all. Evan is VP, and a swell guy. But what has he done since the AH article? Had some knives made? He's not participated in lists or forums, and usually doesn't even make the board meetings. I expect more from the VP. And Evan isn't the only seemingly dormant leader. What have you done, Jean? I truly hope you don't count making a new category in the forums as one of your key accomplishments.
The money *is* being put to use. As Jason pointed out we're talking to a couple of PR firms and expect to spend the funds that way. Being slow to spend it is a bit of a problem but we are actively working on that.
Decisiveness is key to being a good manager. "We're working on it" for months on end just doesn't cut it with me.