USPA Special Election June 1-30

[dmathews1960 5]

@BMAC615  Clearly, the third party liability insurance is a value to every dues paying member.  Although we can all argue about whether we should be forced to purchase insurance (we are with auto liability insurance), it is a benefit to not only skydivers but to the dropzones we need to know that if someone damages another's property, it won't mean the DZ is sued.    

I believe the efforts on behalf of Safety, including the annual summary of fatalities and the new analysis of non-fatal injuries, Safety Day, and ongoing Safety messaging  is also a benefit to members.

I don't know what percentage of the 42,000 members have instructional ratings, but clearly for those who do (like myself) it is a benefit to have a nationally recognized group administer those ratings courses and keep the ratings records.

A much smaller number of people probably compete.  But clearly the competition oversight and organization is a benefit to those who do - both nationally and internationally.  BTW, I think that competitions could become more common if done virtually like the recent "Cloud Games" sponsored by Skydive Chicago.  This would be a natural thing for USPA to do.

I think that if the SIM was a readable, engaging publication, it could serve, and engage, members better.

I think if the membership regularly interacted with the Governing Board as I have suggested by holding AT LEAST one day of each BOD meeting at a busy dropzone (preferably at a large boogie), in an environment where many of the membership would be heard from, and many of the membership would interact directly with Board members, there would be greater "buy-in" by members.  This is doubly true if the things members were saying were then acted on by the Board.

I think that if not only candidate bios, but also statements of what candidates think the USPA is doing well and what they think the USPA should change or improve were made widely available to membership before voting, and if the USPA created an online candidate forum for every election that focused on real issues rather than just name recognition, there would be more of a feeling among membership that their vote counted, and that they really were having a say in the organization.

These are all, however, just my opinions.  

[BMAC615 205]

Appreciate the responses. BTW, I voted for you weeks ago ;-)

[sfzombie13 307]

the sim and irm needs to be made for changes like army manuals.  either make the changes so you can get the pages with the changes that you can paste into the book or with pages in a binder that can be replaced individually.  no way in hell i would ever pay for one only to have it go useless in two years. 

[dmathews1960 5]

@sfzombie13 Excellent idea.  But I have one caveat.  I want a MAJOR revision of each first.  After that, I would anticipate minor, incremental changes that should be easily tracked as you suggest.

 

[dmathews1960 5]

Hey Everybody:  Voting in the USPA National Director Special Election ends Friday June 30th.  A couple of days ago, on another internet group, someone challenged me regarding my opinion on Collegiate Nationals.  I am posting BOTH his comment, and my response below, so you can see where I'm coming from.  Once again, if you agree with the things I'm saying, I would REALLY appreciate your vote.  Thank you.  

Here's his comment:   we had a record attendance of 92 competitors at Collegiates last year. What's your reasoning for why this is "completely unacceptable"? How many attendees would you find to be acceptable? What ideas do you have to increase participation? Rookiefest may be an unfair comparisons as it's open to anyone with 200 or fewer jumps and less than 18 months in the sport -- there may be thousands of such people. Collegiates is open to college students who have the time & resources to also be skydivers.

 

My Response:  Thanks for your comment. I think the first step to improving any situation is coming to some shared agreement that we can/should do something different. Here is my reasoning: There are over 3,000 colleges and universities in the US. Nearly 4,000 if you count branch campuses. By headcount, there are somewhere around 16 million college students nationally. According to the listing in Parachutist, there are 5 College clubs. Clearly the Parachutist list isn't complete, as the service academies aren't listed - which may or may not operate as a club. But you get the picture. My strategy for increasing participation at Collegiate Nationals would be: 1. first to increase the number of active college clubs. I would favor USPA convening a task force including members who have collegiate experience themselves along with Group Member DZ's that are interested in hosting a club. (Forming a club isn't really that hard, I was able to work with students and Michigan State University staff to recreate their club this year). So the first step would be engaging members toward this worthy goal. I would favor USPA making it a high-level, visible priority. 2. I would also ask USPA to create metrics as to the number of Colleges represented each of the last ten years (I would have said five were it not for Covid), and the number of participants. Using this benchmark data, I would ask the task force to set a goal - I honestly don't know what that would be, but how about a Big Goal of ultimately having say 50 Colleges represented at Nationals, or 100? I don't think this is unrealistic, because the system is already set up to allow single skydivers from a College to compete. (I completely agree with you that Rookiefest isn't a good comparison - it was just my attempt to say that if you put effort into new skydivers, good things can happen) 3. I would use Parachutist magazine to highlight this activity, generate interest, etc. The recent USPA webinar was a good start, but as you might guess, had very low participation. The most recent member survey of USPA members shows that if we want to communicate with current members, the print version of Parachutist is the way to go.                                                                                                                                **Postscript:  When I wrote the above answer in the other forum, it was mostly from memory.  Further checking confirms about twelve million of these undergraduate students are full-time, plus there's another 3 million graduate students (I don't know how many are full-time)  But in any case, there's more than 13 million college students in the pool from which to draw (since the competition rules require full-time enrollment the previous semester).  So yes, I think we really can (and should) do better than 95 participants from just a handful of institutions.  Clearly, though, this just my opinion.                                                                                                                                    

[riggerrob 558]

On 6/1/2023 at 11:24 AM, normiss said:

I like those, both seem better than the FAA Class 3 - which I always laughed at. I also never understood why they needed an inventory of tattoos. But, what's wrong with the current urinalysis? 

The 'Inventory of tattoos" is to help identify the corpse after you hook-turn yourself into the morgue.

Hah!

Hah!

Caution: black humor.