Two-Tier Membership Proposal

Hello All,

As you know, HackPittsburgh is a young and growing organization, and we’re still trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. HackPittsburgh wouldn’t exist without the efforts of our members, with their donations of time, money, materials, and hard work. That said, we have been having many issues with the current “Dues plus 3 volunteer hours” system, including folks having trouble finding the time to do their volunteer hours, not knowing what qualifies as volunteer work, or simply not wanting to volunteer time.

Instead of trying to hold all of our members up to the same high standard of volunteering, the council is proposing a two-tier membership system for HackPittsburgh. In short, we want to give members the option of being Casual Members, or Die-Hard Members. Casual Members will pay a flat fee, and will have no volunteering requirement, but will also not receive as many benefits. Die-Hard Members will continue to pay a sliding scale based upon volunteer time, but receive more membership benefits.

We’re also proposing to revamp the current volunteering system, to move away from a “3 hours” system to a “30 points” system. A Membership Committee will be formed to keep track of each member’s points, to maintain a list of qualified activities that members can choose from to earn points, and accept proposals from members for new activities.

All of this and more are described in the full Two-Tier Membership Proposal document, available as a Google Doc.

We plan to bring this proposal to a vote at the next HackPittsburgh General Member’s meeting, September 27th, at 1pm. We invite you to give us feedback on this proposal in the forums.

We are grateful for all of the hard work of our members, and we hope to allow and encourage everyone to participate in HackPittsburgh at a level that is valuable to them, while constantly improving the shop and the organization.