X-Message-Number: 31085 Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:33:44 -0700 (PDT) From: david pizer <> Subject: what's up with the Venturists FD asked about the Venturists: "Is its Board elected by Venturist members, or does it follow the Alcor model? Its board members seem to be mostly from Alcor." DAVID: At one time our members elected Directors. When we quit publishing our magazine and stopped having the annual get-togethers interest in the organization went down. We simply were not doing anything valuable to the cryonics movement at that time. We had to switch to a Director electing system like Alcor just to handle things because of lack of interest. FD asked: "How many Venturist members are there, and what voting rights do they have?" DAVID At one time there were well over 100 cryonicists who were signed up as Venturist members and paying dues. Since then there have been about 100 other people who have called themselves Venturists or gotten involved in some way or other. But as of the last few years we have no one who wants to volunteer to keep membership records, do billing, and such. Also we need to be championing things that cryonicists want that the suspension organizations are not doing (to avoid duplicaiton). I am hoping that if we can add several new members to our Board who want to do some work that we can revitalize the organization and get enough energy going that we can switch back to where the members elect the Directors. We are hoping some qualified people with energy and ideas to advance the cryonics movement in general will want to serve on our Board. We have found a place where we can be of help in some ways lately by trying to help to raise money to get some people suspended. Let's see where we end up? David Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31085