This will be the first and could be the last, blog entry where I discuss items specifically related to the Senior Citizens Consortium organization. However, it was a request from one of our organization’s officers and I felt that the request was reasonable, so here it is.

The 2007 SCC Conference

Nashville, Tennessee – home of the Tennessee Walking Horse, Jack Daniels Whiskey and the Grand Ole Opry. Oh yeah, it is also the home of Country Music. To this storied land, the SCC members came to meet and greet. To have face to face interactions after so long of simply being cyber friends. All in all, even with the significantly reduced participation, it was a very good meetup, everyone was enjoying each other’s company and we had a couple of reallyl good meals to share and hold great conversations. What’s a conference meeting for, if not that? A tour on a river boat, a shopping expedition and a visit to the saloons on Broadway to hear live country music were among the fun things.

Those members who attended all agreed that we would really like to make the 2008 Conference a much bigger and better set of sessions. So, we are going to start now, working on a location and venue for the next conference. We hope to be able to encourage more people to attend.

Oh yeah, at the Nashville Conference, we also conducted some SCC business. The very first SCC official business strategy meeting was held on Friday afternoon. The original SCC agenda, created when we thought we would be many more in attendance, was scrapped and we had only two items on the agenda for the Annual Business Meeting. These were:

Establishing a formal organizational structure
Establishing a formal membership organization

I will present a summary of these items on this blog entry, but will have a more detailed presentation in formal documents available on the SCC Home Page.

Membership Organization

First the membership organization is the most important. We have had a significant number of people come to our SCC web site, participate on our members forum and on our BLOG. Some counts are in the neighborhood of 90 to 92 actual members. We had a couple of duplicates and two “management” userids. But in the end, we were over 90 people strong. This has changed over the past few months and we have had several members leave our organization for one reason or another. Some, thankfully, have returned with our new SCC2008 focus and member board forum.

With regard to those members who we have lost, we were concerned about them personally and had no knowledge of why they left. Considering that we had one member pass and we were grieved, we were thinking along the lines of how to maintain contact with our members and friends without being intrusive, yet being able to contact them after a prolonged absence to make sure that they were alright.

A more detailed description of the Nashville Conference discussions are found in the Proceedings document which is posted on the SCC Home Page under Administration.

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Formal Organization Structure

As an adjunct to the membership approach, we would also establish the formal organizational structure for the SCC and would develop and publish a set of organizational documents. These have been completed and are in final edit review. Once the reviews are completed, these documents will be available for viewing by the general public. Our official documentation includes, Mission Statement, Charter, and By-Laws.

These documents will also be posted on the SCC Home Page under Administration.

All documents will be available for viewing by November 1, 2007.

To those who were orginally planning to attend but for one reason or another could not, we would encourge you to start planning now to attend the next conference. We promise a great time and a learning experience.

The new message board is up and running thanks to Harvey Hodges.  Several of our old friends are back posting again.  We have been having a wonderful time discussing issues, informing each other of new current events and just generally enjoying friendly conversation.  Any of you who haven’t signed up yet, please do so.  Come have your morning coffee and conversation with your Cyber friends on the SCC board.