All,
The following is the latest report from Keith Wheeland the Internal
Organization (I/O) liason with the NSS.
I receive this pretty much every month and whomever is our next President
will be receiving it and sharing it with the membership.
Especially note the comments toward the bottom (Congress of
Grottos--COG--report from the VP of Operations) regarding archiving
electronic copies of newsletters and the glitch therein.
Some of the information below folks will hopefully be able to look at before
the next meeting, such as the Board of Governors (BOG) plans for NSS Public
Outreach. It's worth discussing. Also mentioned are discussions on cavechat
re: making new members welcome.
Welcome, new members! Plan to be at ESS Cave the weekend before Hallowe'en
(no hazing, just Hallowe'en). It's a very fun cave with a great rancher and
we will have fun.
There are four items in this issue
1) Posting IO INFO to Cave Chat.
2) NSS Membership Committee Announcement
3) About the online IO Record
4) Congress of Grottos Update by Dave Luckins, NSS Operations Vice
President.
>>>>1) Posting IO INFO to Cave Chat.
The IO INFO is published almost monthly or more often as necessary. It
contains items of interest to IOs that have been provided by others or
included from my own list of things that I think IOs should be aware of.
IO INFO is sent to all IO Contacts to be shared with the members of the
IOs. If this is not happening notify your IO officers and request them to
set up a mechanism to allow this to happen. A lot of IOs already do this
by forwarding the publication to the electronic list of members.
NSS president, Wm Shrewsbury, told me that a number of IOs have not been
sending the IO INFO to their members and suggested that I should post the
issues on Cave Chat.
I posted some of the items in this issue on Cave Chat. In that first
posting to Cave Chat, I included some basic information about the IO
online record. You may find a lot of information on the IO website at
www.caves.org/committee/i-o/ <http://www.caves.org/committee/i-o/> All IO
officers should know what topics are on the IO website.
I will continue to re-post the information on Cave Chat in order to to try
to ensure a more complete distribution of the information.
Keith
_____________________________________________
>>>2) NSS Membership Committee Announcement
______________________________________________
Something to remind your grotto members about, for a lot of times, cavers
just get lost in the shuffle of moving, changing computer addys, telephone
numbers, etc. So here are some thoughts to take care of in this first
thought from the Membership Committee. :>)
1. Just a friendly reminder if you move, change your phone number, or your
email addy, please let the NSS Office know of that change. [The easiest
and quickest way to do that is to go to the NSS website www.caves.org
<http://www.caves.org> and click on the Member change of info in the right
hand column.] You wonder why you're not getting your great /NSS NEWS/, but
sometimes, it's because you've moved and forgot to let the NSS Office know
about that change.
When it's renewing membership to the NSS, you wonder why we can't find
you, and it's because you've changed your email addy, so just like your
power and water bills, please let the NSS Office know of this switch.
And, last, but not least, let even the NSS Office know of your phone
number changes, for sometimes, folks try and phone you and the number is
disconnected or doesn't recognize the number, so...these three items are
all very important. :>) When we use our Member’s Manual, this is where a
lot of us try and get info from, so…’tis very important to be updated…even
if not until the following time it comes out. (Yeah, I know, I know… the
MM won’t be coming out this year, but…you get the point, right?
2. If you haven’t been to CaveChat sponsored by the NSS--
http://www.cavechat.org/ - there’s been some great discussions going on;
and, one such discussion has been how the NSS grottos can be more
accepting of new cavers into their grotto.
3. Going along with #2, above, one of the items that the NSS has been
working with the Planning Committee, as well as the Membership Committee,
is this read that you and other grotto members should be learning more
about.
http://www.caves.org/committee/planning/documents/SPF1_NSSandPublicOutreach.pdf
We sometimes blame the BOG for things that go wrong, but when you read
this document, you’ll see that the BOG has a great calendar of events
lined up for several years, if it can be implemented. With our new BOG and
new President, Wm Shrewsbury, I believe we’ll begin to see changes…but we’ve
got to give them the time to work on the problems that a number of folks
have been writing about in CaveChat, so…discuss it at your grotto
meetings, like in November and December, for you’ll need the time to
digest all sixteen pages. And, then write to the BOG members and/or the
Planning Committee and let them know your grotto’s feelings.
You’ve got to remember, BOG members are volunteers like all of us in the
grottos; thus, they only have so much time to devote to NSS issues and get
things solved.
4. And, finally, for those of you who attended this past great convention,
in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, you know that the NSS Membership Committee
had a survey going on about a few items on what was good and bad about the
NSS. Nothing is going to be perfect, right? Any reactions to this or the
surveys before the convention, can be mailed to us at members...@caves.org
<mailto:members...@caves.org> and it will get to the members on the
committee.
~Ernie Coffman ecjc...@charter.net
___________________________________
>>>>3) About the online IO Record
____________________________________
An IO (Internal Organization) --which means internal to the NSS – may be a
Grotto, a Region, a Section, or a Survey. These are the only IOs. There
are other groups recognized by the NSS but they are not IOs.
Each IO has an online record that may be accessed and updated by using the
IO Serial Number that was assigned at the time of chartering plus a
password unique to the IO. The person in the IO responsible for keeping
the record up to date may update the record at any time. When the record
is updated during the month of January, it is considered as submitting the
IO Annual Report for the previous calendar yearto the IO Committee. That
is a requirement of each IO in order to retain their charter. It generally
takes less than 5 minutes to make this happen. Perhaps even less time if
the record has been updated throughout the year as changes occur in the
IO. You can go online and see what is in the record for your grotto by
going to the NSS website and clicking on Find a Local Caving Club, then
select the state in which your IO is located. A list of grottos will be
presented. Alternately you can click on NSS Organization in the left hand
column, then scroll down until you find Internal Organizations. You may
click on any of the IOs to see a list. Since the information is collected
and displayed in real time from the online record, you can see the
importance of keeping the online record up to date during the year. Be
sure that you assign the updating task to someone in your IO who likes to
do it, so that it gets done between cave trips. That means that the
administrative work gets done and you can go caving without worrying about
it.
Keith
_______________________________________________________________________________________
>>>> 4) Congress of Grottos (COG) Update by Dave Luckins, NSS
Operations Vice President.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
During the Colorado Convention, the COG requested a process be set up to
accept electronic newsletters in the Library.As you know, it is a
requirement that copies of a grottos newsletter be provided to the Library
and to the Cave Files Committee.
Dick Blenz (Cave Files) has been accepting electronic newsletters for
sometime (He “cuts and pastes” the cave info.) but the Library hasn’t been
capable until recently.We now have the server capacity to accept
newsletters and to store them.So, that part of the COG’s request is moving
forward.The rub is a national “library standard” that requires all
electronic media be backed-up by a hard copy.The rationale for this
standard is an “accepted format” lasts about eight years before it’s
replaced by a new format.Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about floppies
(remember them?) or CD’s or if we’re talking about formats like PDF’s….things
change, forcing equipment upgrades.Equipment upgrades happened slowly
because they’re expensive.Hence the need to have a paper back-up.That way
one always has a paper copy to transfer into the new format.
At the moment, we don’t have staffing or funding to create paper copies of
electronic newsletters.I’m running the office as close to bone as possible
from a staffing viewpoint.The only way to free someone up would be to
further automate our office systems (and we’re progressing toward that) so
that less clerical time is needed for day-to-day tasks.Complicating all
this is the fact that grottos have switched to extensive use of color (now
free in electronic formats) and we all know how expensive is to print
color copies.So, assigning the task to the Librarian and asking him to
print a copy doesn’t work until we can find the money to pay for the
copies.
At this point, the only way I can fully accomplish the COG’s request is to
ask for */one/* paper copy of each newsletter…and that just doesn’t seem
to accomplish the goal of being electronic.
Anyone got a really bright idea?
Dave Luckins, OVP. o...@caves.org
_________________________________________________________________________
--
--
Keith D. Wheeland, NSS 2878
NSS Board Member and Chair of NSS IO Committee
2191 Mt. View Ave.
State College, PA 16801-7214
814-238-2057
kwheel...@psualum.com (Use this forwarding address in your address book)
IO Website - www.caves.org/committee/i-o/
Annual Report& Updates- www.nssio.org
_______________________________________________
PBSS mailing list
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