[unyoc-planning] Today's meeting, Michael possibly absent

[Labrecque, Michael]

Hi all,
I plan to be at today’s meeting, but something’s come up that may necessitate my attention elsewhere, not sure about how the timing will fall.
In case I am absent, there’s two things I wanted to discuss or bring to your attention:


  1.  Vendor email
     *   Earlier this week, I received an email from Mark Hyer at Third Iron, indicating he had purchased a UNYOC membership and was looking for a membership directory to advertise Third Iron’s library products. I conferred about this using the board listserv and while it’s clear we will not share membership info or allow advertisement in this way, I haven’t replied to him yet because I’m not sure what we do want to say: I don’t want to alienate a vendor who could sponsor the conference. I was also wondering if I should forward it to our Mark as the vendor relations chair?

  2.  DiscussionForum
     *   The board’s been discussing options for changing our listserv and as part of that discussion, we’re considering the communication functions of a listserv, etc. we had the idea that to allow communication between members, we could utilize the forum functionality on WildApricot. To test things out (it was very easy), I created a forum, ostensibly for discussion of the 2025 Conference, here: Upstate NY/Ontario Chapter of the Medical Library Association - Conference Discussion Forum *experimental*<https://unyoc.wildapricot.org/forum-conference>.


Basically this is a proof-of-concept right now, with the background rationale being: (a)listservs function to allow members to send out mass emails and then foster discussion (b)listservs cost a lot of money, (c)WildApricot cannot act as a listserv, but it can send out mass emails to members, (d)WildApricot does allow discussions between members via forums.
Nothing has been decided yet, but IF we ditch listservs completely due to cost, we’re looking at the feasibility of jury-rigging a listserv’s functionality by, when someone wants to communicate to the entire membership, having a contact-point admin send a mass email using WildApricot and then having a link to discussion about that email.

Some considerations for our group:
               * is this something we want to keep, advertise and encourage member discussions to direct our development of the conference program? Or do you forsee this getting messy, and should we delete this ‘conference discussion’ forum?
*are there any ways we can utilize this right now?
If I’m not at the meeting, let me know your thoughts and if there are any action items for me before next month.
-Michael

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