DW,
I read on your other thread about your concern at the lack of answers to your questions. I doubt that I'm one of the people you are looking for comment from, so if there are specific people you'd like to hear from maybe you should say who they are so they know.
Anyway, regards being official, I'm not involved in running clubs at all so I don't know what constitutes an "official" club, who you need to be recognised by etc.
Personally, I think it might be a good idea to get a bit more official in the sense of being more organised, just so that things like the Sweatshop deal can be properley organised without all the work landing on one person - i.e. you. Perhaps the club has grown to the point where it needs a bit of organising. I would like it to be as organised as it can get without losing its informality and without becoming bureacratic - where that line falls I don't know.
However, it depends what people want from the club. I notice that Running Fitness mag does now seem to have a virtual club via its website, which is very organised, but it is a very corporate/marketing-focused affair, which is not really what I would want. I imagine that if we asked RW mag about formal recognition - whatever is meant by that - then that is the direction they would want to go in. But I don't know if they've been asked about that.
The trick is getting people to think about what they want from the club, rather than what they want from the forum. It might be an idea to start a new thread on that. We'd need to keep boinging it back up the list - not because nobody cares but because they ought to think about it for a while. Maybe such posts should be prefixed - e.g "Club Business: kit orders" - so that people can see that it's a bit more serious and not chat. Such posts could also include a bit of brief info about the club, so that everyone in the forums gets to know about it.
I've got sore fingers now...
Neil
