Re: [IRCA] More on mergers

[Chernos Saul <sauldx@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting points brought up in this discussion.

Thanks to John and Ben and others for providing perhaps the clearest and most concise history I've ever read about what happened in and around 1963, and what has resulted since then. It's helpful to know...

I also appreciated Jim Renfrew's comments about mergers, and his analogy to churches. I particularly like his strategic way of seeing things. It made me think hard about my pro-merger view.

Ultimately, at the end of the day I still think merging IRCA and NRC might be the best thing for AM DXing in North America. That's given the rapidly changing nature of broadcasting and our reduced numbers in the clubs, if not the hobby itself (Scott Fybush mentioned thousands on a Facebook DX site, something that's previously unknown to me and absolutely fascinating).

Still, in terms of a merger, it seems to me we may not be there right now, and we may never be there, for lots of reasons - good, bad or otherwise - that many have stated here.

Jim's analogy to churches got me thinking about my own opposition to the amalgamation more than a decade ago of a number of boroughs in the Toronto area to form a new, much larger City of Toronto. I thought it a terrible move for many reasons - it killed a lot of 'local' that made each of those smaller boroughs unique, it allowed politicians from some outlying areas of the new city to pit their areas of the city against those more downtown; and vice-versa. Our current mayor, whom all of you likely know of, is a product of a lot of this. I could go on.

At the time, as opposed as I was to amalgamating the boroughs, I thought it would have been sensible to amalgamate certain services, and/or to create cooperative service agreements or something of the sort. Firefighting, for instance. Police. Public transportation. Perhaps some aspects of municipal services such as water and sewage. But it was definitely unwise, for example, to have people 30 miles away from the waterfront deciding on development decisions there. Amalgamation hasn't proven so good for municipal planning and zoning, though I do think the different boroughs, as they were, would have benefitted from degrees of coordination.

So as Jim alluded to with churches, I would agree there's lessons out there for DX clubs and the larger DX community / communities. Many of which we've touched on, like the different forms of governance.

Perhaps the way forward is to take some stock of what's out there, and of who is out there. And take a project-oriented approach to preserving the hobby and its infrastructure.

The kind of cooperation that saw a twinned IRCA-NRC convention last year, and twinned NRC-WTFDA conventions in years past, is proof that a sufficient number of people from the various clubs are eager and able to work together. 

IRCA-NRC has also had a joint DX Test committee. (I'm guilty of falling by the wayside on that one but there's several others who still collaborate in that regard).

Some other suggestions here have make eminent sense, such as joint columns where the content or preparation is labour or data-intensive, for instance.

I love the NRC paper log, and I also loved Lee Freshwater's web-based directory, which I at least thought of as an IRCA effort though I'm not entirely sure if that's correct. It's too bad the latter has ended - I would love to see the NRC log also available online, for a fee to non-members or free to members of either club or some variation of that. I am fully aware there were issues awhile back involving the paper log's proprietariness, but maybe there's a way to figure this one out so the integrity of the log and its publisher(s) can be maintained and respected. Would it not be amazing to have a joint online NRC-IRCA AM station log that's fully searchable and up to date? (Currently I'm using the NRC log and Barry McLarnon's amazingly good and highly searchable online list).

No doubt there's the valid perspective that competition can push volunteer efforts up a notch or two, and to some degree I can understand that argument. There may be times that's true, though we're largely talking volunteers, not businesses.

But Lee needed to step down and his perfectly good site - his years of excellent, dedicated work - went kaplooey. I'm at a loss as to why it could not have been merged with some other volunteer effort, even an online one. If our numbers are dropping, at least in the clubs, there may be actual tangible projects to do in tandem.

Perhaps by taking a project-oriented approach we'd nurture the actual services and such that we depend on, and sooner or later we might have some larger sense of what's best for our future.

I'm also intrigued by the apparent success of the Facebook group, though I'm somewhat wary of the transitory nature of things online. Today Facebook, tomorrow something else, the day after etc. But if that's where a substantial number of the younger generation are congregating - interesting.

Saul Chernos

 		 	   		  
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