Austrian Alpine Club (UK) Ltd

Sektion Britannia’s closure will benefit all of us

Only those in countries lacking their own ÖAV Sektion are able to join the ÖAV in Innsbruck directly. If we try to do so at present, then as soon as we reveal our UK addresses they refuse to accept our membership applications and insist on our joining Sektion Britannia instead.

When (not ‘if’) the Club is bankrupted and closes down, all of us will positively benefit, by being able to join the ÖAV in Innsbruck directly, with transactions in English, paying cheaper subscriptions than we do at present, and without our current heavy admin burden.

I feel sure that the ÖAV will be only too pleased to give joining UK residents the address of our UK Meets Programme Website together with our current year’s web-access password.


Creating and maintaining our own website

It costs very little to choose a vacant website name and purchase it, and hosting it is also cheap.

If our current (retiring?) Board of Directors can agree the ideal contents layout, I will load it onto their chosen website and provide a very comprehensive set of written instructions needed to maintain it, (already largely completed), and then upload this Guide into a hidden location in the new club website. I would then hand it all over and step back out of the way (unless there are good grounds for persuading me otherwise).

We would certainly need an enthusiastic volunteer to take on the role of Webmaster, but there would be no other management roles which need filling.


Website Content

Please can we keep it simple and unpretentious?

Members could be invited to submit full details of their proposed meets to the Webmaster, who would publish them appropriately,

The Webmaster would maintain a separate linked webpage (which costs nothing) for each type of activity in our Meets Programme, such as for:

The Webmaster would then list the contents of each of the above linked webpages in chronological order, the next event at the top and the final one at the bottom, deleting each one as soon as it has taken place.

Each Residential Meet entry would comprise the following:

  1. The arrival and departure dates, plus the accomodation's earliest arrival time.
  2. The identification and rough location of the chosen venue, linked to that Venue's description which would provide full location and accommodation details.
  3. The attendance fee.
  4. The identity of the meet organiser, who would handle all bookings.

The following gives only a preliminary example of how the webpages might look

242 Header

This following would be optimised once data becomes available.


Residential Fell Walking, Rambling, and Scrambling Meets in the UK

DatesLocationCostPlaces Booked
by the Club		 Places Taken
by members		 Meet Organiser and
contact details
??????
??????
??????
??????
??????

One-Day Fell Walking, Rambling, and Scrambling Meets in the UK

DateMeet LocationMeet TimeObjectivesOrganiser
?????
?????
?????
?????


Our Historic Training Programme

Please can we start with the facts? The Club does not and never has “provided” any mountaineering training. The Club merely “promotes” training courses, all of which are “provided” by professional mountain training companies.

In the commercial world we live in, these training companies will doubtless be paying our Club a financial reward for every place we fill on their courses, and we will doubtless be passing on these sums, pretending that they are subsidies provided by our Club itself. If I am mistaken, please blame it on the Club’s deliberate lack of transparency. Anyone claiming to have read this webpage must be able to prove it by quoting the word ‘Verbier’.

The most obvious reason to provide training is to provide Meet Leaders for all of our meets. However, we cannot legally provide Meet 'Leaders', since the provision of any package that includes both accommodation and excursion leadership is required by law to comply with the Package Travel Directive , which we have always ignored.

It surely follows that we have no need for trained meet leaders.

Here is an obvious solution: if we published in our meets rubric the following "Mandatory Stipulation: Everyone booking a place on a meet must accept full personal responsibility for their own actions throughout the meet, with specific reference to where they go, what they do, and with whom they do it, ", (insisting that all attendees had agreed to it in advance), both civil liability issues and OTT safety bureaucracy might be nipped in the bud. This proposed Optimum Solution would not preclude meet participants from choosing, for example, to traverse the Cuillin Ridge on the Isle of Skye during the meet, since each one doing so would be doing it out of personal choice, accepting full responsibility for whatever they do. By providing them with the opportunity to enjoy the companionship of similarly like-minded fellow-members on such a challenging excursion, their personal safety would be enhanced.



Off the subject of future meets, our new website could very easily have other links:

  1. To an explanation of how members could submit appropriate articles for web publication. [Since each article would appear on its own webpage, there would be no limit on either text length or number of embedded photos, which could all be of full screen width.]
  2. To an existing Club Archive of over 480 well-indexed feature articles taken from previous Newsletters.


What motivated me to create this website?

Firstly, I am totally incapable of turning a blind eye to deliberate criminal tax evasion.

Secondly, since our Directors have supported Mike Garrett’s success in destroying me in the eyes of our Club’s membership, I am quite determined to fight back and retaliate, completely justifiably, simply by publicly blowing the whistle on Mike's deliberate lawlessness. Our (incompetent or vindictive?) Directors have certainly made it inevitable, sooner or later, so they have only themselves to blame.



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