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

[Tyson.Clugg at csiro.au]

Once again, please move this type of conversation to WGStructure.

-----Original Message-----
From: Geoff Hammond [mailto:ghammond at bigpond.net.au]
Sent: Friday, 19 April 2002 5:17 PM
To: 'Melbwireless (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [MLB-WIRELESS] Membership fees etc. - was Fw: Public Wireless
Networks Fight Back


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  <mailto:paul at serc.rmit.edu.au> den Bergen 
To: 'Melbwireless (E-mail) <mailto:melbwireless at www.wireless.org.au>  
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 <mailto:lkhoo at csc.com.au>  wrote:


Drew wrote:


fee "to ensure stability in the network and to cover the cost of

maintenance

and upgrading.""


I probably wont be the last person to say "wtf?". Are they providing
customers with access SLA's? (service level agreements)
Then again, Telstra charge big bucks for clients to access their cable and
adsl networks and don't have SLA's (to end users).

If they are charging money for access to their network  then isn't this go
against the whole"non-profit" 2.4ghz usage agreement?

Lucas



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-- 

Dr Paul van den Bergen

SERC

goofey:bulwynkl

paul at serc.rmit.edu.au <mailto:paul at serc.rmit.edu.au> 

+613 9925 1624 (RMIT)

+613 9905 4654 (Monash-less often)


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