Category for Affiliated Societies

[Kathy-WPalmBeach]

I have never heard of Societies limiting the number of "free" meetings a visitor can attend. In S Florida this doesn't seem to be a problem.

[Kentucky]

I never heard of it either. We have a fantastic rate of visitor to member conversions. Most join during their first visit. I know of no situation where a visitor abused the liberal visitation privilege.

???

[epiphyte]

Two things...

First thing....not sure about other parts of the country but here in Los Angeles, the Farm and Garden section on Craigslist is becoming quite popular. A few months ago I wrote an article on how orchid society members can utilize Craigslist to help promote their society...

Craigslist for Orchid Societies

Second thing...Group Purchase Opportunities (GPOs) add great value for orchid society members but it doesn't seem like that many societies regularly offer GPOs for their members. Well...or maybe they do but they just don't publicize the opportunities on the orchid forums. Here is a GPO page that I just put together to help automate the consolidation of participants' orders for my society's current GPO...

Floralia Group Purchase

The details of this GPO can be found on the flickr group for orchid hobbyists in Southern California.

[epiphyte]

Shortly after joining my society, a long time member and myself were discussing methods of promoting the society when I brought up the idea of encouraging members to write articles to upload to the society website. He literally laughed. He said the problem was that most members weren't knowledgeable enough to write articles. Figured it wouldn't hurt to ask anyways...so I e-mailed all our members and encouraged them to write an article on any orchid related topic. As I expected, nobody submitted an article...which seemed to lend credence to my friend's observation.

One possible explanation is that you really can't become sufficiently knowledgeable about orchids by solely relying on one presentation per month. Not sure how many people borrow orchid books from our library but, as I mentioned in one of my posts above, it's been 12 years since anybody has requested access to our collection of AOS magazines.

Perhaps reading articles is strongly correlated with writing articles. So here's what I'm wondering...what is the AOS's official stance on photocopying one AOS article / month and handing out the copies to society members? Does this fall under the fair use, educational and non commercial purposes concept? I'm guessing it does but wanted to verify it in case anybody on my society's board objected to the idea on the grounds of copyright infringement.