HOA WEB Site

Hello,

I am looking for feed back.

A member of our Board is pushing for some kind of rules and regulations regarding control of the web site. He wants the Board to have yeah and nay on all content appearing on the web site I am the web master, built the site and in almost 3 years have been careful as to what is actually published. No controversy has ever appeared. I am against his suggestion, as it is counter productive, and will cause unnecessary delay of publishing important information.

Has anyone been faced with the same situation and if so what was the resolution?

Thank you.

DavidF6

I've always been waiting to see what happens when the web master gets fed up with the nano-managers on the Board and just shuts down the website. There's a lot of gray area as to what would happen in this situation in terms of property rights, copywrites, and who owns the webpages etc. Now I'm not suggesting anything here, but I'm just curious.

This can easily happen. Now for full disclosure, we are biased because we sell a community website service: However if the board contracts with a professional company to offer the service, then the board is in control. With Community123.com, even if the Editor goes ballistic and posts inappropriate content the Board can quickly have us cut off the Editor's access. Even if the Editor deletes content, we have backups and can recover it. This is the danger with having a volunteer web editor that holds the keys, has all the passwords and all the backups. The association totally loses control of a site they promote as their 'official' face on the Internet.

The community website is a 'corporate asset' of the association and should be treated as such.

Come on, everybody. The first amendment of our constitution guarantees freedom of speech. What great wisdom does someone else acquire when they are elected to the board of directors so they can censor speech. Rather, it may be that they can't stand the heat. As Harry Truman said, "If you can't stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen." How can problems and concerns be addressed if they can't be discussed?

Of course what is posted should be civil. The civility rules that apply to members meetings, and are defined Robert's Rules of Order and/or parliamentary law should be sufficient. Nothing should be posted that would be out of order at a members' meeting. That includes identification by name, the same as should occur at a meeting.

Most discussion forums have terms of service which must be accepted as part of the registration process required to be able to post messages and replies. Look at what newspapers do with their forum. Most include a link on each post for "Reporting Abuse." The web master need only respond to the reports of abuse, and delete posts if they don't comply with the terms of service.

The 1st amendment comes up quite often in relation to HOAs. However, anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe it applies in this case.

The 1st amendment does not apply inside a private corporation, which a HOA/Condo Association is. Just as the board of GE would not allow employees 'free speech' in it's official newsletters, emails, websites, etc, neither must a HOA/Condo allow its members 'free speech' in it's official internal communication media (website, newsletters, etc). The HOA/Condo board is ultimately responsible for the official communications of the association so it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control or oversight of official corporate/association media.

My prior post concerned good policy, not the law. I recognize there are some who claim that people check their constitutional rights before entering an owners association. If we allow that to happen, then shame on us.

We should all be lobbying our legislators for owners association legislation that guarantees our rights under the federal and state constitutions. But we don't have to have such legislation to have good policy within the owners associations.