Over the years there have been many requests for volunteers to help running this organization and usually not a lot of replies. If you got rid of all of the people who contribute their time without getting anything in return, except for occasional thanks, I expect that would be the end of the Pacific Bulb Society. I for one am very grateful for all the volunteers. I periodically have asked for help with the wiki and for whatever reason, maybe because of the learning curve, it hasn't resulted in the last few years of any sustained help. Dues for this organization are modest and that allows people to participate in the BX and the SX and to get the Bulb Garden and provides money to pay to keep the list, the wiki, the BX/SX, the Bulb Garden, and the forum going. The main job of the Board is to find ways to make sure all of those things continue. There was email discussion about forum vs list before the Board made the decision to start a forum. There were many of us who preferred the list, but also others that were unhappy with it. I suspect if there had been a vote there would have been no consensus. And who would you have vote? The list has always been available to people who were not members of the Pacific Bulb Society. So would all of them be allowed to vote even though they do not pay dues? It seems to me that the Board came up with a compromise. They created the forum, but did not do away with the list. The disadvantage to this is that announcements like the BX have to be two places and some people just participate in one or the other so we don't have the rich discussions that we once had. The advantage is that people who were unhappy with the list now have the forum and those people who preferred the list still have it. If David Pilling is able to find a list where it is easy to add photos I'm sure the people who use the list would be grateful. David has given so much of his time over the years. I'm not sure how many people recognize this. It was 2009 when the wiki was no longer functional since the software was not being updated and some things no longer worked. We had to convert. This is one of the times when I asked for help and got it. David volunteered and he has been the main stay of technical help since then. That's 13 years. It took me a year to fix everything after we converted it to new software. During the conversion a lot of people checked pages for me and reported the mistakes I needed to fix. And a lot of people helped over the years with the wiki, but now there are few. Luckily David continues to help and Martin has spent a lot of time on it as well, but basically it's just the three of us. Arnold has been volunteering since 2002, maybe before. He does all the mailings, manages the finances, contacts new members. Jane McGary has put in years and years, was President, before she took over membership and writes for the Bulb Garden. Diane Whitehead has been helping with the list for years and years. And there are many others who have helped for a long time. Robin is editing the Bulb Garden AND being the President. Who would you replace? PBS is lucky that they have continued to help. It would be really unfortunate if posts like the one from Robert led to resignations. Mary Sue On 2/12/2023 8:42 AM, Robert Lauf via pbs wrote: > Yes, it would be nice to allow members to vote on lots of things, but the PBS governance model appears to be patterned on that of Cuba. The Board essentially elects its own members from a list of candidates they select via an arbitrary, capricious, and completely opaque process, much like the Politburo. We were recently (inadvertently) given a glimpse into the inner workings and attitudes at the Mother Ship and it wasn't a pretty picture. Nor surprisingly, many excellent people have better things to do than try to improve things in the face of resistance, secrecy, and outright abuse. Is it any wonder that volunteers are hard to find in this environment? > It's time to send a few of the Commissars off the the Gulag and start over. Just my opinion, but feel free to make it your own. > Bob Zone 7 > _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> PBS Forum https://…