It strikes me today that the Internet may be killing the classic hobby-related local club.  You know - the local car clubs, knitting clubs, camping clubs, etc where you pay a yearly fee, write by-laws for the club, hold elections for officers, maintain a budget, and plan a calendar of club activities (the ultimate “point” of the club’s reason for existing).

I’m seeing it happen in Jeep clubs.  One the one hand, here is one local club, the Michigan Two Trackers, a club my family and I were part of for a couple of years. The club has been around for over 25 years, and plans trail rides and other Jeep-related events that often include trail cleanups and donations to charity.  Total membership, as I recall, was around 50 families.  Active members were probably half that, people who showed up at the meetings even less.  And who could blame people for not wanting to come to a two-hour meeting once a month, endure Robert’s Rules of Order in passing motions, and worry about a couple-hundred dollar a year budget?  I mean, these are Jeep guys.  They like to talk Jeeps, work on Jeeps, and drive Jeeps, and the club always struggled to even find people to plan and lead the trail runs.

On the other hand, take a look at Michigan Jeepers, a web site with a busy forum section for four wheel drive enthusiasts that live in Michigan.  The site has over 2800 registered users, with more members that live in my home town than the Two Trackers had.  The site plans, as a group, trail runs, trail cleanups, holiday parties, and charitable giving - all the same things as the club does, but without the boring meetings, by-laws, and officer elections.  The website take the place of the meetings and newsletter, and officers are no longer required - formal or informal polls can determine the actions of the group.  What’s more, the “community” is available at any time, stronger bonds can be formed much more quickly than with a once a month meeting.  Is it a legal, non-profit organization? No, but who cares?  It provides it’s members with all the benefits of a classic hobby-related “club” with little or none of the formalized boring stuff.

The only thing I would lament about the passing of the club, is the lobbying power that dozens of local clubs can have when rolled up nationally.  In the Jeep world the national organization is the United Four Wheel Drive Association.  The UFWDA creates has programs that provide training, awareness, etc.  But more importantly they retain a lawyer to lobby in Washington on behalf of all four wheel drive enthusiasts, a very important function in this day and age of land and trail closures.

I wonder if an organization like UFWDA sees the writing on the wall for the local club?  I wonder if the Internet can achieve, at the national level, the same things that UFWDA achieves?  Should we, as active Internet forum users continue to support them outside of the club structure, or consider them as “old-school” as the local club?

I don’t know the answers to those questions.  But I do know, that as more and more computer-savvy young people get old enough to buy a Jeep, the local club is going to appear as outmoded as the party phone line to them, and the national level folks like UFWDA better realize that soon.

Update - I’ve deleted previous comments and closed the commenting ability on this article.  I’m not sure why suddenly it was getting so much traffic as I wrote it over 18 months ago, but the discussion more and more had nothing to do with the idea/thought I was trying to get across. 

In case you haven’t noticed, I own a Jeep and do like to off-road with it.  If you feel that I shouldn’t be able to do that on public lands set aside for the purpose in a legal and responsible way, you can publish that thought somewhere else on the internet.