If there is an appropriate "constitution" for the class, all the objectives, rules, regulations, as well as the way in which the class is governed, and the directions that the class can move, etc is all spelled out in black and white. If the constitution is written correctly it becomes the total "protection" of the goals, ideals, dimensions, motivations etc of the "class" and makes it "safe" from ANY one or group who may try to "sabotage" it, either from within or without. It also provides the foundation means for the class to grow and proliferate. Any "association without an appropriate constitution, tends to become disjointed, arbitary, and often will eventually tear itself apart through conflicting direction opinions.

Don't forget to apply for these memberships !

If you want to have your voted counted you MUST apply and succesfully acquire this F16 membership !

Wouter

Steve,

No disagreement with your general sentiments. My concern is that the proposed rule is going to be harder for some people to satisfy than others. For those near existing concentrations of F16s, or just close to large cat fleets in general, they may satisfy the rule every time they go sailing. But others may have to drive very long distances, maybe even cross national borders to find a qualifying race.

To answer your question "why would such a sailor have difficulty in attending ONE regatta a year as F16", what happens when the first F16 turns up in New Zealand (outstanding opportunity for F16 development btw) and races first to finish against the small emerging F18 fleet there sailing out of Royal Akarana? As I understand it, this owner would not be eligible for F16 class membership. I don't see why that's a good situation.

There is no doubt that encouraging people to be actively involved in the class is absolutely a good thing. I'm just not sure that trying to legislate for it is necessarily the best way to do that.

Mark.

Wouter, how do you plan to contact the F16 owners to get them to become members of the class -- and to explain to them the requirements of membership?

Are you using mail, e-mail? In general, most of the sailors we know do not frequent forums, so I assume that would be true of F16 sailors, too.

I know Rick does not even know about this membership thing, and the forum is on his own web site.

How do I do it? <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />
Rick

The preliminary answer to this question in contained in Wouter's original post in this topic. As he said, a more formal explanation will shortly be forthcoming.

It is not the chairmans responsibility to contact the owners, its the other way around.

But, Mark, that does not address the problem of how Wouter is going to contact all the F16 owners. Rick was just an example of why a forum is definitely not the way. It is only a supplement to the primary way, which has to involve personal contact -- face-to-face, phone, e-mail or mail.

Hmmmm. I guess that depends on whether or not he wants members.

I can't get into my opinions about the membership "plan" because they might create controversy, and I am told that controversy is counterproductive right now. Maybe the climate will be better in the fall.

If he chose to be the chairman, he has no option. He has to support and accept the members. All he is doing is making sure, the F16 members participate activley and he just collects the info. That cant be to hard or imposible to do.

It is just like almost everything in life. If you want to keep practicing in a specific field, you must maintain a minimum qualification.

You can't collect information from people who do not know you are collecting it.

Because of the forums right? Well what if he is collecting it via other ways? ie, emails, phone calls, faxes, smoke signals, letters ect...

Right, Robi. That's exactly what I asked Wouter -- how he is going to do it.

Hi Mary, yes you are correct. I was answering Rick's question, not yours.

On the issue you've raised, my guess is that in the first instance Wouter would make use of the same communication channel he has been using to connect with the F16 community for the past 3.5 years - the official class forum.

No doubt once formal membership is in place he would be able to contact members directly (of course he can't do that at the moment for the very reason that formal membership doesn't yet exist - hence the move in that direction I guess).

However for the moment I presume that anyone with a particular interest in the class would be using the forum to keep up to date with current developments.

But I should let him speak for himself. Especially since I don't even own an F16 .

Mark.

Thank you Mark,

You gave the exact same answers I would have given. Thank you for taking care of that.

Indeed, the F16 forum is the official communication form of the F16 class. It even says so in the class rules. I live by the principle that anybody who is interested in the F16 class will at least tune in to this forum once in awhile.

And indeed, how can I contact "members" when they have not identified themselfs to me in the first place ? This is, again, indeed one of the reasons to form the formal membership list.

Also I'm not going to call, fly-over to face-to-face them, snail mail or spend many e-mails finding the lastest current adress of potential members. That is a huge time if not money investment that I'm not willing to make personally and I guess everybody seriously interested in the membership will find their way to the me on their own devices. Also Robi is helping out by face-to-face the sailors attending the events like Gulfport. This seems like the role a local class organisation should play.

I this case I also think we must remember that the members themselfs are requested to invest some efforts themselfs. I'm doing this as a hobby and because I believe in the enjoyment of sailing these boats. That doesn't mean that I enjoy chasing down people and handling all personal affairs for them. Sorry, I rather go out sailing myself.

Wouter

Mary,

You may give your opinion on this forum, that is fine. I wouldn't dream of banning that. I just requested that it doesn't include items that are obviously misleading to new members. Statements like "... there is no F16 sailing worth mentioning in Florida ..." Or that hooters/furling headsails are banned, both of these statements are don't do justice to the what is true.

Of course I also would like to keep the discussion flowing as I use that to finalize the membership document and regulations. Obviously comments that only state that something is very wrong don't help me. Withous specifying an workable alternative I have no choice but to discard such a comment in favour of the current setup.

I give everybody the opportunity to give input but it must contain some new idea or feature to be valuable.

Of course giving your opinion with some new proposals and ideas can never be controversial. Especially when a mild style of writing is used as well.


With respect to your statement :"Hmmmm. I guess that depends on whether or not he wants members."

That is a example of a statement that is not very helpful. Of course I want to see a large membership listing but I'm limited in the available resources because I do this as a hobby and not as a full time occupation. Actively chasing down every body is not something that I can do right now with the other issues than I'm working on now. Besides I think that members can be expected to show a minimal level of effort to become a VOTING member. Mostly because I expect all voting members to educate themselfs properly on any voting issue and that takes some personal effort as well.


The second statement of your post :

"I can't get into my opinions about the membership "plan" because they might create controversy, and I am told that controversy is counterproductive right now. Maybe the climate will be better in the fall. "

Is also a bit manipulative. I never banned you from given your opinion. I only asked if you could reword the questions and opinions in such a way that it didn't create the controversies that we've seen a few weeks ago. You know I'm a sucker for some hard hitting statements as well and I too had to tone down for this forum. If I can do it, then ... ?

So please give us your opinions

Wouter

Collection proces :

Using the forum to call for sailors to request memberships regulary over the coming months.

Receiving membership applications via Formula16class(at)hotmail.com

Processing them.

Over time mouth-to-mouth will start kicking in as well and the memberships will keep rolling in

Anybody hwo has not seen the forum post or hasn't received the mouth-to-mouth at events is either not seriously interested or doesn't go to events. I have doubt wether these sailors are very valuable as voting members. Sorry.

Also as stated early I'm under the impression that a US class is being formed. I think this "getting the membership out" is an thing that is perfectly suited to the local organisations. I seem to remember you wanted to be part in starting up this organisation so maybe I should ask how YOU are going to it ?

Wouter

Asking financial membership fees or not

The choice for not having the normal (or conventional) membership fee setup is that that is often more trouble than it is worth. Especially in the beginning of a class.

Example : I order to be allowed to receive money from members and use it several nations in the world demand that you are officially registered at some government agency, that you pay renewal fees, maintain a board of officials and that you do a book keeping that is suitable to inspection.

I've done this before in two instances and I really don NOT want to do this when I can help it. Right now in the F16 we have no need for big financial support. We'll probably ask for some donations to maintain and spice up the website and such but that is less than just maintaining registration in for example The Netherlands. I seriously do not have anytime running a fully verifiable membership fee system nor do I enjoy such work at all. It always leads to lots of compliants and most notibly it leads to grandstanding members who think they have a right to demand everything they desire because they parted by some 30 bucks or something. I refer to Steve's comments. I've seen this happen often enough and I really have no taste to waste my spare time like that. I'm much better off spending that time in activities that actually grow the class.

So I won't do that on a international level. This doesn't mean however that local class organisations aren't allowed to register themselfs, pay all the duties, work-out all the requirements, satisfy them and handle the paying members. You guys are free to do that. However, this set up is fully contained within the local classes and the international voting membership is complete independent from that.

Yes we do things differently than other classes and we have good reasons for that. Our track record speaks for itself. 3 independent builders with 3 independent F16 models a 4th is on the way, world penetration. We must take care to realize that this unconventional setup did allow us to achieve that. I for one am more than happy to continue with it and milk it some further. I don't see any merit in ANY conventional class setup. Besides it wouldn't fit the F16 class well, our designs are different and so are we. Who else can offer a full carbon mast for 700 pounds (1000 Euro's/1300 US$) ? Who else offers the same performance per buck as we do and all over the world as well ? I really haven't seen any reason why we should abandon our succes setup now in favour for a more conventional setup that so much did NOT work for other classes.

But to both Darryll and others I say, setup up your local class structure along the lines you favour and proof us wrong. You are welcome to do that. But I'm NOT going to do it. I don't have the time for it, I don't see the need for it and my activities do not require such a setup. So I'm the wrong person to talk to here. Get into contact directly with your local F16 sailors and convince them to pay membership fees to you in return for which you will build the local class for them.




For centuries trains have used wheels to move along, since a decade engineers are working on magnetic levitation so that trains of the future are more efficient energy wise, less noisy, faster, smoother in the ride and can carry more weight. Are we to tell these guys that they have it all wrong because wheels have worked forever ? What would such an attitude have done to catamaran design over the last 20 years ? Would F16 ever have formed in such a enviroment ? Sorry Darryl, nice punch line but short on workable content.





You have misunderstood the situation. I DON'T want to change the format of the association, just make it more formal. I REALLY DON'T want to bring it more in line with other organisations; I don't think they work well. Example the F20 class was without a class board for some 10 months, and nearly died, because they couldn't find volunteers to replace the outgoing ones. Problems like that, the F16 structure was designed to handle such "signs of our times" and grow nevertheless. We seem to have done just that since our inception. It served us very well so why should we consider downgrading to an setup that is of the past ?





Thank you Darryl, I have a completely different opinion and I'm willing to take the risk and so to are the other founders. As we created this class and builded it up from scratch I think we have some background on which to base such a different opinion.

I really don't see any future problems of this kind. All I see is a class that does what needs to be done an d nothing more. This is most cost effective to members and already they get one of the best designed catamarans in the world with events like Gulfport 1-up championship and the DCC or Australian/Asia F16 challenges.

So I repeat. You are all free to set up local organisations along the lines you think best, I'm anxious to be proven wrong but the international organisation will not go to a more conventional setup for the foreseeable future because I don't have the time for that nor a sufficient number of members to pay for it and I'm not going to pay for it out of my own pocket .

Wouter

Wouter, as I have told you, you are your own worst enemy when it comes to provoking controversies.

I did not say anything about F-16 sailing in Florida, that I can recall or find. Maybe that was Rick. I said in a brief parenthetical once that the F16 class has not yet gotten going in the United States. But I also said that the Blade being manufactured here is going to be a big help.

I did not say anything about the Hooter being "banned" by the class. I questioned the mid-girth measurement requirement which seemed to effectively preclude Hooters. It seemed that the mid-girth requirement was really only adopted by the F16 class because it makes sail measuring more efficient because then measurers can use the ISAF sail-measuring guidelines. For a headsail it seems as though the important thing is to make sure that all the headsails fit within the maximum sail area. It just seems silly to have a measurement rule that precludes a smaller, flatter headsail that is probably slower.

I also added that Calvert now says that he thinks he can build a Hooter-type, furling headsail that will work with the mid-girth rule. So maybe it is a non-issue. We shall see, probably at Rick's expense for the experimentation. And depending upon the results of Hooters racing against spinnakers, this issue might be revisited in the future. No point in discussing it until there is some comparative data on windward-leeward courses, with the headsails only being used on the leeward courses.

Regarding the formalizing of membership, I already gave you all my suggestions and opinions in a private e-mail. Would you prefer that I reprint that here on the forum? Or would it be "not helpful"? I'm never quite sure.

My appologies if I contributed statements to you that were not yours.

Wouter