[MLB-WIRELESS] Membership fees etc. - was Fw: Public Wireless Networks Fight Back

[Geoff Hammond]

In the event that we incorporate, the legislative regulations dictate that members must pay a membership fee. From memory, this can be as low as legal tender dictates, but in my (limited) experience is usually a couple of dollars.

Consider the model of public radio groups such as 3PBS-FM. A Co-operative has been set up which comprises a bunch of shareholders (from memory, $2 a share with a minimum limit). They look to 'subscribers', 'patrons' and 'sponsors' to help pay operating expenses, but also look to people's sense of fair play to cough up - they do not preclude anyone from listening to the broadcast. Melbourne Wireless could do the same thing (in time) - using bandwidth management or some other method, 'owners' or 'subscribers' could get a service which is in excess of Joe Public...

This is free advice - worth nearly as much as it cost you.
gah

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Paul van den Bergen 
  To: 'Melbwireless (E-mail) 
  Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 11:35 AM
  Subject: Re: [MLB-WIRELESS] Membership fees etc. - was Fw: Public Wireless Networks Fight Back


  Hi all,
  FWIW, I can actually see the arguement of the sydney group.  when is free truely free? at what point does a volunteer group grow too big to be run on a voluntee only basis?

  OK, so free and not-for-profit are not the same thing.

  we have just set up (at least potentially) as a NFP org, right?  
  so why are we doing that?
  are we going to require all people who access melb wireless to abide by usage rules? 
  enforcement?
  contract?
  this implies that non-members (what ever that means) are excluded.
  even if melbwireless owns none of the infrastructure (which I doubt will be totally true - eg. the web server...)
  the club still has admin and accounting costs.... and so on
  at what point do we cross over form being private owners of hardware and into the area of being a public access network.

  ofcourse, like one notion before me, I have no answers to these questions....


  mind you, $100 might seem a little steep and I could understand that as a criticism, unless there is some hardware or similar issues we cannot see from here.


  On 04/19/02 09:52 AM, lkhoo at csc.com.au wrote:

Drew wrote:fee "to ensure stability in the network and to cover the cost ofmaintenanceand upgrading.""I probably wont be the last person to say "wtf?". Are they providingcustomers with access SLA's? (service level agreements)Then again, Telstra charge big bucks for clients to access their cable andadsl networks and don't have SLA's (to end users).If they are charging money for access to their network  then isn't this goagainst the whole"non-profit" 2.4ghz usage agreement?LucasTo unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at wireless.org.auwith "unsubscribe melbwireless" in the body of the message


-- 
Dr Paul van den Bergen
SERC
goofey:bulwynkl
paul at serc.rmit.edu.au
+613 9925 1624 (RMIT)
+613 9905 4654 (Monash-less often)

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