Dave,

Running a bit far afield on this topic, but....With regard to the RCACB members being accessible and wanting more feedback, this is where the AMA and the RCACB board members have fallen flat.

On the AMA website is a list of the board members. The list contains the District they represent, their name, and physical address. This leaves us the option of mailing them a letter, or showing up at their door as avenues to provide feedback. In this day and age, I would hope that eacg board member could at least be provided with an official e-mail ([email protected]) address to be published on the AMA site. If the AMA is unwilling/unable to provide this, then I would challenge each board member to insist that an e-mail address (gmail, etc...) be placed on the AMA list for board related corespondence. I sent an e-mail to Greg Hahn a while back relating this deficiency....text pasted below...and it was well received, but has not been acted upon to date......

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Greg,

I'm not sure if you are the person to send this to. If not, please forward appropriately, or let me know who needs to read this.

We can easily find the members of our contest board listed in the AMA magazine and conveniently located on the AMA website. However, the information for them includes only the name, the AMA district they represent, and their physical address. If I had the desire to provide an opinion/feedack to my contest board representative, or any of the other representatives, I am left with only a few choices to do so:

1. I can write them a letter and mail it.
2. I can show up at their house since I have their address..
3. I can dig around online in places like mailing lists (nsrca for example) forums, etc....and maybe find a private e-mail address to send an e-mail to.

None of these choices are really effective at giving the board member the ability so receive input from their constituents to influence their vote in a way that reflects the needs/desires of the majority of members. If I were a board member, I don't think I would want my home address listed on this public list. Call me paranoid, but I think I would rather use a non-physical communications method, or at least use a PO box. That being said, it would be very easy for the AMA to provide a secure, private means for these people to receive communications from the membership. They could easily do one of the following:

1. Preferred method: An online link next to each board members name that opens a contact form. This form would require a minimum of information to identify the person (Name, AMA number to determine district, e-mail address) and field to type in what the member would like to say. Once the form is filled out properly, the information is sent to board members e-mail address of choice on file with the AMA. This is the contact model is used by many web sites now when you click the "contact us" link and works well to gather some information and prevents having to provide an e-mail address that can be abused by spam forwarding, etc...

2. Alternate method: Give each board member a "modelaircraft.org" e-mail address for official use and publish those on the website. This is more cumbersome for all parties, because the member must now check this e-mail remotely or have it forwarded to a private e-mail address. It also does not force the submiter to provide even the most basic of information to identify themselves to the board member.
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