Wisconsin Association of Repeaters

Members, Stakeholders, and friends: The WAR board members sat down and met several times over the past few weeks to create a proposal to update and revise our bylaws.

Bylaws are a “big thing”. They, along with policy documents, determine how an organization is governed. It spells out how the organization is to operate. It’s important enough that it requires a larger majority and two separate votes to make a change. Yes, it’s that big.

And it was time to change them.

The bylaws were created many, many years ago and amended several times. Much of the language was convoluted and old. There were things that weren’t very clear. We wanted to clean that up.

At the same time, we felt it was a good time to look at how our organization is structured. We looked at several similar organizations to see what they were doing. We took that information and compared it to what we were doing, and saw some problems.

First off, the “board” was just a few officers, elected every year. It was possible that the entire group of leaders would change every year, or that we’d get a nomination for one position, but not another. That makes it pretty hard to keep any kind of momentum or consistency going. We decided to fix that by moving to staggered two-year terms, meaning that only half the board changes every year. Second, there should be more and better representation on the board. To that end, we proposed not only expanding the number of board members but also adding representatives to the board from each geographical area. Let’s face it, we’re a big spread-out state. Naturally, the odds favor more people being able to get involved from the more populous parts of the state, which “stacks the deck” a bit. On
the same token, if we “forced” the board to consist of members from certain regions, it could result in open positions if nobody was willing to volunteer from an area, or perhaps someone is elected who isn’t an ideal candidate just to fill the position. Doing it this way allows for anyone who wants to
participate to be able, and we’ll have representation from around the state.

The second major change is how the officers are elected. Right now, the membership votes for the Chairman, Vice Chair, etc. We propose to have the membership vote for the Directors of the board, then let the board appoint the officers (positions of President, Vice President, etc) from within the
board members. This allows for the board to fill vacancies (if the President or Vice President step down for example) or allows for an officer to perhaps step down from an officer position but remain on the board. All of our neighboring associations operate this way, and we feel that it offers quite a bit of flexibility.

Another proposed change is with voting. We want everyone who is entitled to vote to do so. We updated the language to allow for proxy voting via representative, postal mail, or even electronic  means. We also opened the door for the possibility of holding meetings via the internet so that you
won’t need to travel to participate.

The goal here is to allow as many people to participate in as many ways as possible. I feel that this gets us much closer to that.

The changes will have to happen in two steps: First, the members need to approve the changes with a simple majority at the upcoming annual meeting. We then need to publish the changes (which we’re doing now) and have a second meeting later in the year where 2/3rd’s of the members present need to approve them.

Please take the time to read the proposed changes. They are important. If there is something that you don’t understand, please feel free to contact me for clarification. We spent a lot of time debating these changes, so I am intimately familiar with them.

And please, participate. This is your organization, and it’s important to everyone that it remains healthy and vibrant. It’s my hope that the proposed bylaw and policy changes help facilitate that in future.

And, as always, contact me anytime: chairman@wi-repeaters.org. I’d love to hear from you.

73 and Happy Holidays!
Chris, W9JOL

Hello again, I am pleased to make several announcements today – all of which I think are positive!

First off, we are finally kicking off a round of periodic updates in order to get our database updated. I realize that it’s a long time coming, but we had a lot of fixing to do this year, so it took a back seat for a while. Now that we’re back on track, we expect the periodic updates to once again continue. Be looking for the update request, and please make sure to update it and promptly return it, because…

…it won’t be long before our next membership meeting! This one will be important. It will be your chance to vote on the new policy changes that your board is proposing. It’s the culmination of almost nine months of bi-weekly meetings, working to clarify our policies and bring them into the presentday. You’ll find the proposed document by clicking this link. I encourage you to review the document and be prepared to vote at our next meeting. We can’t get you the meeting notification if we don’t have your correct contact information, so make sure it’s up to date!

About the proposed policy changes – I want to make sure that we’re clear on why we proposed these changes. As many of you are aware, spectrum everywhere is becoming scarce, even in the amateur bands. The upside of new technology is that it’s making it easier than ever to put a repeater on the air. We want to be sure that everyone who wants to put a system together can, and that everyone is well protected and can operate in harmony. We want to make it easy to receive a coordination, and if issues arise, we want to be crystal clear about who holds what  esponsibilities and what the process is that goes into each coordination recommendation. The process should be completely transparent.

Let’s not fool ourselves – our spectrum is valuable. If we don’t use it (or if we don’t use it in an efficient way with little need for FCC involvement) we’ll lose it. Simple as that. In fact, our coordinator recognized the value of modeling well over a decade ago, and while the operational policy did not
support those efforts, it was and is in fact the only way to gain better use of our spectrum. Adjacent state coordinators recognized this as well, and were benefited by the approach.

I think you’ll agree that our policy is based on common sense, fair play, and best engineering practices. I also think that you’ll agree that we’re again setting the standard for professional, well-done repeater coordination in Wisconsin.

Next, I’d like to mention that whether or not I’m re-elected as Chairman (and this is not me campaigning, I promise!) I have recommended to the board that we bring back a second membership meeting that will be held in other parts of the state. The reality is that Milwaukee is a huge population
center and a large portion of coordination’s are held there, so it makes sense to hold a meeting in that area. However, there is no reason to not hold a meeting elsewhere in the state as well. I think that we need to get back to two meetings a year now that we’ve gotten caught up with the basic issues that we need to address. My hope is that will encourage more involvement and interaction with what we’re trying to accomplish.

Please look for the meeting notice in the mail after the first of the year, and please PLEASE plan on being there. I would love to see a large crowd and have some engagement from our stakeholders.

And, as always, I encourage you to contact me at any time. My email is chairman@wi-repeaters.org.

Thank you, and 73.
Chris, W9JOL

Greetings! I want to get you up to speed on what your board has been up to. I know it seems like we’ve been pretty quiet, but to be honest we’ve been more active than we’ve been in many years.

The Board of Directors has been meeting at least twice a month since March, working to create proposed changes to our policy and by-laws for members to review and ultimately vote on.

Why all the work? Well, as we started to plow through our agenda at the first meeting, it was obvious that our policy and by-laws were outdated and not very functional. It was my feeling that any of the cosmetic changes we were discussing would really be meaningless without a strong foundation to build upon. So we made the decision to forego (for now) coordination updates and many of the formalities of years past while we work on these difficult but wholesale changes to how we conduct business.

As of this writing, we are 99% finished with the proposed policy changes, and we have a meeting scheduled in November to hammer out the proposed bylaw changes. Right after that meeting takes place we’ll be posting the proposals here, and sending out snail mail to our members asking to review them.

Here’s the important part: We need YOU to participate. Look at the documents. Review them. Ask questions. We will be asking the membership to vote on the changes at our next membership meeting in March 2017. It is important that we get these changes done so that we can put our organization back on track and get back to the bigger non-policy changes and ideas that we have for the future.

As I’ve said in the beginning, my goal as the current Chairman is to be able to hand off a strong, focused organization to the next Chairman. It should be more modern, streamlined, and in tune to the spectrum challenges we face in the future. I don’t look at my term as Chairman as ceremonial. I look
at it as an opportunity to get to work and position the organization for the future.

I hope that when you see the proposed policy and by-law changes that your Board has worked on diligently to craft, you’ll agree that I met my goal.

As always, I welcome your feedback. As others have found, you’ll always get a reply from me. You can email me at: chairman@wi-repeaters.org.

Thanks and 73,
Chris, W9JOL