Frequently asked questions for clubs and club members

Yes and no. In fact there are two ways of accomplishing this.

I'll start with the no part. There is no way to have both a private and a public set of conversations simultaneously in a club. The reason for this is that club permissions are managed by the type of club that the club owner has opted to create. There are five of these types of clubs, as follows.

Public 
Everyone can see the club and its posts, and can participate without joining.

Open 
Everyone can see the club and its posts, but only members can participate. Everyone can join.

Reserved 
Everyone can see the club and who's in it, but only members can see posts and participate. Users need to ask a leader to join.

Private 
Only members can find the club and see its posts. Users need to be invited by a leader to join.

Read Only 
Everyone can see the club and its posts, but only members can participate. Users need to be invited by a leader to join.

Most clubs opt for the Reserved type which means that people can see that there is a club, they can see the members, but they cannot actively see or participate in content without being members. If one chose, one could create an Open club in which case non-members could see all the content but not participate. And then there is the more drastic option, one that we do not allow for chartered clubs, and that is one in which everything is open. As you can see, there are two other types, Private and Read Only.

Now for some reasoning. The idea behind Ham Community is to encourage both private conversations among club members, but also the opportunity to converse with the broader amateur radio community. As such, a club member who wishes to start or engage in a more open conversation, would simply post the topic in the general community. This paradigm encourages closed discussions within the club and open discussions with the community at large.

Amateur radio clubs use Ham Community for FREE! FOREVER!

Why? How?

To be transparent, the Ham Community business model does not depend on membership dues. Our goal is not to charge clubs or members. Quite the contrary, we benefit from a large number of happy and engaged members.

This said, there are occasional services for which Ham Community will charge clubs a minimum fee to cover transactions. For instance, clubs who use our payment system to charge their own members' dues, are charged a minimal percentage to cover PayPal transaction fees. This is not a profit-driven charge, we just want to cover our own costs.

Future, optional, specialized software tools may also be offered for a fee. Again, these would be very specialized tools that in no way affect the fundamental running of the club.

We insist on repeating that our community grows only if our individual and club members are satisfied with the platform and can enjoy it free of charge.

It can be, or not. Personally, we believe that Ham Community is the perfect HAM club environment. It provides all the key features needed to manage a club. There is a nets calendar, there are blogs for leadership, there are discussion forums, club moderators can send out newsletters, there are even member image galleries to post Field Day photos, meeting photos or other. There is also a downloads section where clubs can keep their important files such as the club constitution, or meeting minutes, for members to download freely.

This said, clubs are welcome to have their own website and use Ham Community as their community building tool.

Note that clubs can keep their own domain name (url) and simply 'point it' to their personal Ham Community space.

In addition to the many tools available to clubs (blogs, image galleries, discussion forums, etc.) Ham Community also offers the ability to manage club membership and dues collections. This is absolutely not a condition for clubs to join Ham Community. We do not even encourage clubs to use Ham Community to charge their membership dues. However, should they want to, they can.

Dues are collected using Paypal. Ham Community charges a minor fee to cover Paypal transaction costs only.

The advantage of using Ham Community to charge dues and manage membership is that it centralizes all club activity in one place.