[plug] Family membership

[Russell Steicke]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 10:47:32AM +0800, Timothy White wrote:
> Russell Steicke wrote:
> > I thought I'd kick off the discussion that was anticipated last night,
> > about family memberships for PLUG.  I'm in favour of the idea, and
> > suggest that a family membership be twice the cost of a full
> > (non-concession) membership.
> 
> While not against the idea, how does a family membership makes things
> lots cheaper? I know someone said, if you have 5 people, it's $50, which
> yes, is a lot, but if you have 5 people, lets assume that 2 are parents,
>  3 are children, so it would only be $35 as children would be concession.

We can think about the pricing issue too much, I think.  Just pick a
figure.  I'd support either twice normal membership, or as Bret
suggested, normal + concession, or anything similar.

> Coming away from the cost side of things. What do we provide in terms of
> service? For a family of 5, do they get 5 accounts on the plug server? I
> know for a fact, that as we provide an email address with your
> memebership, a family isn't going to want to share one email. Of course,
> lots of people don't even use their plug email address, but lets make
> the assumption that they are going to use it.

All members of the family should get all the benefits.

> Lastly, on the server side of things, do we want to provide a way that
> the family accounts, are all linked in some way? Obviously this makes
> sense for making payments, but say for example, on of their older
> children leaves home, do they still want to be part of the family
> account, or should their account be separated from the family account?

Linking in the database is up to whoever maintains the database.  Is
that you, Tim?  Otherwise the additional family members' memberships
would be updated normally since they're still paying something.

> Of course, we have the "what is a family" question as well... I'll leave
> that to someone else ;-)

How about: related people living at the same address.  And we leave it
up to them to be honest about their circumstances.  It's not as though
there's a huge loss if someone isn't all that truthful here.




-- 
Russell Steicke

-- Fortune says:
Man who falls in vat of molten optical glass makes spectacle of self.