[Before posting the link and commentary to an STC Ning closed list - I hadn't read any of the 25 comments to Tom's original blog-posting. I now see that a number of "bloggers" that frequent the "I'd rather be writing" BLOG will also pick up on this, my first posting to this list.]

In my posting (to the STC Ning Ideas List), I took the liberty (I hope you don’t mind-Tom!) of quoting from Tom’s original post i.e. ” ….if the STC were to dissolve, although it would be a tremendous blow to the communities across the globe, the hundreds of tech comm. bloggers would still create engaging content to read. Academics and other authors would still publish books and articles. Vendors would still continue to develop and innovate products. Listservs would continue to flourish. Conferences (though smaller) would still be held. The profession would continue to thrive…..

The STC Chapters in Europe (and Israel) do collaborate, and personally I’ve been involved, for example, in being part of the Team organizing a Convention in London (2006), and have attended Anniversary celebrations and smaller conventions in Paris (France Chapter) & Munich (TransAlpine Chapter). STC now also has a EUROPE SIG (Special Interest Group) to which I belong.

The STC as an umbrella organization can offer more value to its members outside the USA, but in order to do so, it has to be more cognizant of the needs of its International Members. A number of significant changes need to be introduced to prove that there is added value in being a member of an International Professional association, as opposed to belonging to and supporting more “local-cohesive” self run entities.

Maybe an STC Canada, STC US-East, South, West, etc. Europe-ME-A – or maybe even returning to a more refined Regional Director-Sponsor management approach – which seemed to have worked well for the STC in the past?

In any event, I suppose we’ll just have to see how the current STC crisis plays out and is either resolved or………

I had thought the STC might deploy a CMS on the STC servers which permits hosting of multiple sites with independent administration — such as a Plone or a Drupal. Then each subdomain would actually point to a local instance of the CMS administered by a local chapter or SIG, hosted by STC, with some capabilities then for local chapters to use central STC APIs (for things such as validation of current membership or conversations among/between chapters). This would permit as much or as little connection between chapters as desired, but theoretically far more than we see today. It would permit more ambitious functionality (as any new features would potentially be available to far more STC members than new modules/products installed solely on one chapter’s site would). And it would permit chapters to keep their funds inside the organization, rather than use them to pay for-profit ISPs.

This would be a value provided by central STC to the chapters, one which scales nicely (needing a smaller cost-per-member the more chapters use the service), and might employ our members’ expertise in content management to permit the whole STC to benefit smaller chapters, which may not have that sort of expertise locally. My thought was that this sort of service might be able to reaffirm the value of a strong central STC to local chapters, and to members.

Overall, more people would join the STC if they saw the value that it provides. But even when you join the STC, the value you feel isn’t apparent.

Couldn’t have said it better. I hope the STC board has read this blog posting….for its own good…

Head office sent out an RFP for a company to develop a community platform to integrate with our membership database, and create a virtual facebook, but the members of the technology committee (including me) balked at the estimated cost of developing a MS solution and lobbied to push the open source market to create something similar to sitepoint.com .

The sad fact is that while we want to use our volunteers to manage these resources, all of us have other jobs that are not being done in order to do the work of our chapters, SIGs, or the overall organization. If head office had a more tech-savvy project manager who understood remote collaboration tools and took a more leadership role in building our virtual teams to keep the different projects on target, then we’d experience less frustration, move forward more quickly, and have less cluttered email boxes.

For now, the best options we have available for online community building are the STC Forum at http://stcforum.org , the wiki (request an account on one of the forum topics), and now the new Ning groups set up for the Single Sourcing SIG and STC Ideas. These are invitation-only SIGs for which most STC members have already received the private URL.