What an amazing thing the Whitchurch Website is.
Here is the result of a survey with some comments.

Heres the numbers upon which I base this article.
Posts   Views   %
98   8491   1.15
10   4804   0.21
108   13295   1.36
      



Websites mean you don�t have to go to meetings to speak or listen. We all know there are sometimes people at meetings who hardly ever say anything and in my experience once a committee gets over ten folk two almost always never say anything.

If instead of the web we had a meeting and that meeting was a mile away and lasted for 2 hrs and that meeting had only time to consider say 10 points then we would need 2659 meetings. Most leisure groups meet on average once per month and there is only twelve of those in any year so the views could be expressed over 221 years.

The mileage is considerable 5318 miles there and back or 177 gallons of petrol.�

That�s just for listening.

The speaker�s worth (those who contributed to the 108 posts) and remember some posters do several is not easy to evaluate.

If the listeners agree with everything the posters say then we have an interesting condition. If the posted views are varied� and the audience is varied we have an ideal democratic situation. Viewing is far more popular than posting, only 1.36% of the total debate, posting and listening, is posting.

Is everyone really that satisfied ?

In this totally scientific and inclusive analysis one must look for other reasons why the postings are not higher.

The first is that everyone is madly interested and would like to reply but they have not got the time. I am very conscious right now that I should be down at the pub.

They may of course agree with all that is said or disagree with all that is said and feel it is not worth the time even bothering to reply.

They may of course have very strong feelings but their replies are so full of rude expletives that they are being filtered out by anti-spam programmes.

They may feel so strongly about certain issues that they are deeply involved with strategic planning the outcome of which will be very apparent to us sometime in the future.

They may be feeling very charitable and do not want to upset those who post, feeling that just because the posters� have nothing better to do it would not be fair to challenge one of their pursuits.

They may of course not want to have a high profile in case they are button-holed at the pub. Some posters are aware of this and have pseudonyms. The psychology of chosen pseudonyms is an interesting topic in itself.

Some potential respondents may fall asleep just before they can reply.

Only our webmaster who can monitor what we are doing and when can tell us whether the views are so high because a few posters read their posts repeatedly either out of self agrandisment or because they cannot remember what they said.


I do have a view based on other things. It is that most people and most evolved beings are highly conservative. In industrial psychology and advertising science it is well known that most of the decisions we make are based upon the predispositional factors that affect decision making. Most of our daily decisions are made subconsciously and we do not like different or change. Even when our genes cross only the outer ones on the chromosome, well away from the centromere, exchange information. Minor changes only take place so the possibility of seeing people with three heads and several sets of lungs is very low.

I do wish more people would respond as I do feel that everyone has power and if enough have their say in a structured way a sensitive group will seek to accommodate all wishes.

Graham Burgess.