Diversity, in all its forms.

Yesterday, I was picked-up on Twitter by last year's candidate for RSGB president, Simone Wilson, G0BOX.

Now, I've heard of Ms. Wilson in the past, but that was my sum knowledge.  I was genuinely interested to find that her previous callsign, assigned to a Simon Wilson at the same address, was G6BOX.

So, as Simone herself explains on her blog, we have someone who has changed gender identity, about which I make no comment or judgment whatsoever, other than to say it's a very good thing that we have diversity like this within the RSGB.

Extract of a longer exchange on Twitter, 21/01/2022.

Simone made her case in an open and honest way, and without any of the nastiness that so often emanates from the mouths and typing fingers of others. 

But in the end, all we did was go around in circles. 

Simone began with the view that yes, the RSGB is saddled with retired people running the show, but that, to slightly paraphrase, 'with age comes experience', and 'only the retired can afford to work for free.'

The trouble is, this began to sound like a justification for why the RSGB has Board members with ages between 66 and 74 years. 

Yes, of course it's the case that being at work all day and maybe looking after kids in the evening makes being active in running a society like the RSGB difficult. But it's nowhere near impossible. I studied for a degree in the evenings after working all day, brought up a family and was very active almost nightly in writing environmental campaign letters.

It's not true, therefore, that working people can't make time to run something they have a passion for. This is especially true if meetings are scheduled to accommodate them.  

Simone's other contention, to which she stuck to the end of the exchange, that 'with age comes experience', is true only so far.  Working-age people are, by their very definition, the people who make the system work. They run banks, governments, businesses, schools, universities. 

It's ludicrous to suggest that one could only do these things properly when you've reached retirement age.  Listening to her stumbled responses about what makes radio interesting (we all struggle with this one), I think I would gently suggest some media training for Simone and anyone else from the RSGB, so that the answers are immediate, polished and convincing.

Simone regretted that making an appearance on DXCommander's Youtube channel had not engaged the RSGB membership. To be honest, and although this was a form of pre-election campaigning, it's not so much the membership she should be aiming for, but the entire population of people who are yet to think about radio, all the way through to those who have been in the hobby for decades. 

I don't wish to be unkind to Simone, but it's not difficult to see from viewing the video that, nearly a year on, only 2800 people viewed it. There are 23,000 members of the RSGB and about 3 times that many licencees in the UK. DXCommander has 42,000 subscribers.

All did their best. But the fact is that those invovled with the RSGB are not only of retired age, but also of a disposition to find committees and positions on them somehow interesting or desirable. To the rest of us, talk of 'presidents', 'boards' and 'committees' is, self-evidently, from the numbers who have not watched the video, utterly irrelevant.

Which brings me to the conclusion: the RSGB has a structure that is unsuitable for the role it ought to have. It's decided to be a limited company, which forces some degree of formal structure that others may find irrelevant. But a number of us think that committees and structures have long taken hold at the RSGB as 'the way they like it'. Obscure and dull, with people showing little interest in the detail, could be said to allow the ruling elite to conduct business on their, and not members' terms. That is not to say they are doing anything improper, just that their priorities may be all wrong.

For the younger folk, these priorities certainly are wrong.

The reality of being an operator today is one of, typically, living in fairly restricted physical space, with little room for antennas. Neighbours have easy and quick ways to complain, rightly or wrongly, about anything they perceive as 'shouldn't be allowed'. Even if you have a mansion and grounds, it's still an uphill, long and bureaucratic struggle to gain permission for a mast. Radio is not like a new TV, where you plug it in and everything works without a hitch or fuzzy lines across the image.

But the RSGB doesn't lobby for change. It regularly advertises and reviews £10,000 transceivers, but what's the point, when OFCOM allows RFI to render them simply a better receiver of interference?

We need effective, confident campaigning to change planning laws to improve the lot of the amateur operator.  We need to change the relationship with OFCOM, who are certainly not remotely interested in our hobby. We need to reach out to the young and not-so-young who may be thinking of joining us, and do so not by talk of committees, but by what it will give them if they do join. 

None of these things are easy. But I am very sure that the RSGB has some form of internal problem with younger folk gaining a foothold within its structure. We have to accept, as Simone honestly does, that when we get older, we tend to slow down and become more fixed in our way of thinking. That can be a stabilising, wise force for good. But not when everyone displays the same characteristics. 

Society is getting older. But it's not the case that society consists only of older people, nor that working-age people can't run the world before the age of 67. 

A report back around 2010 for the RSGB said that "it's difficult not to conclude that, in the past ten years, the membership has aged by the same amount". That's pretty much true of the Board's makeup, too. 

The simple message for the RSGB as a society, then, is that, no matter how glitzy you want to try and make the web site and RadCom (and those are really not very good at all), maintaining this exclusion of the younger groups - however, precisely, it comes about - is wholly unsustainable and will - not may - see the demise of the society.  I don't think anyone wants that.

UPDATE: after many exchanges on Twitter, I didn't find continued contact with Simone Wilson worthwhile.