We want to strike the right balance between increasing our PTSC-Online membership and controlling our expenses. Please read to see how this may affect your PTSC-Online membership.
First, let me say that if you have completed your PTSC-Online member profile, set your privacy settings so others can see your profile and contributed in any way to PTSC-Online by writing or commenting on an article, this message does not affect you.
PTSC-Online has paid for 300 memberships and with 283 we are getting close to our limit. We have two choices to meet our ongoing need to give memberships to folks who wish to join PTSC-Online. (1) We can pay for more memberships or (2) we can delete memberships which are not being used to make room for new members without any additional cost. We consider a membership is not being used when a member has not completed their profile, set their privacy settings to make it visible and has not made any contribution to our PTSC-Online community. A contribution can be commenting on any article or calendar entry or writing an article etc.
Our PTSC-Online community is made up of members and viewers who are not members and our viewers outnumber members approximately 12 to 1. Both can comment on articles but members have personal profiles, can create articles and can be granted access to password protected secure sections of PTSC-Online. Members can also recieve broadcast messages and have some other benefits.
We value all who access and use PTSC-Online whether or not you are a member, but in the interest of being responsible with our limited resources we believe the best way to make room for new members is to delete some of our non active members and we plan to delete approximately fifty during the month of July. We hope you will not take this personally, we hope that you will continue to visit PTSC-Online and you are welcome to reapply for your membership when you want to participate more actively in your PTSC-Online community.
If you have encountered any difficulties with setting up your profile or using PTSC-Online please contact me or participate in one of our on line training sessions or simply leave a comment on this article.
3 Comments
Other than active contributors, what type of people do you want to be members as opposed to viewers? I am a researcher. Should I bow out so a fireman or a search and rescuer can take my place? Where can I find out why you have the 300 member limit?
Excellent questions Bert, I am pleased you asked them because it shows you are interested and it provides me with an opportunity to answer.
As we describe on our home page all Canadians who have responsibilities for or an interest in making our communities safer and more resilient are welcome to join PTSC-Online. Input from persons with a wide range of backgrounds should make for better discussion so we welcome that. The main reason for joining is to take advantage of the tools PTSC-Online provides for sharing information and collaboration about emergency management related matters. Many features are available to viewers but many more / all are available to members.
As a researcher I believe you are in a good position to share valuable information with our viewers which has the potential to help them improve their emergency management programs (our purpose for existing). Also I hope you will find PTSC-Online and our viewers a valuable source of information for your research. The information you require may not be there today but if you ask a question we can help you find the information you require. In fact, one of our members will be asking for input to assist with a thesis on the whole community approach to emergency management in the near future. I believe PTSC-Online should and can help its members meet their personal and organizational objectives and I see it doing that for those who actively use it. Just to be clear, do not give up your membership so a fireman or other responder can join!
I note an interest on your application in finding out what is happening here as related to other networks. The proliferation of networks can be a challenge and that is why PTSC-Online wants to work with and complement other networks and we are having some success in doing that in our networking section.
Regarding the 300 member limit: The IGLOO on line community cloud service which powers PTSC-Online does not have any member limit but our contract with IGLOO is currently for 300 members. We can increase the number of members at any time but this comes at a cost and to make the best use of our limited resources we need to ask if that is the best decision. Should we purchase new memberships if we have existing members who have not used their memberships since they joined? We don't want to exclude anyone, but a member who is only viewing our articles and not contributing to the discussion can continue to do that as a viewer and can still comment on articles, they just can't add new material or be part of a group which has secure password protected sections.
I hope that answers your and others questions and I thank you again for commenting.
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