[Porchdog]

I recently joined the board of a local professional organization. It's sort of an "umbrella" for a bunch of professional societies that coordinates events, organizes and hosts an annual banquet, funds some student activities. I'm on the board of one of the local societies and was nominated as their representative to this organization.

I'm very new with these people and I'm just catching up with history and some of the personalities and personal relationships.

The most recent chairman is an IT guy and was launching a new website at about the time I joined the board. In the last 6 months he has gotten this website up to a high level of functionality. Our current chair is pushing to make this more available and useful to the member societies, particularly for scheduling and coordinating events and student activities.

The "old" website is becoming a problem. It's only up to date up to this time last year and it has no link to or acknowledgement of the new website. It's the website that comes up first in a Google search.

The "old" website is administered by a former chair, who has moved out of the area. She seems bitter that a new website was created, she claims ownership of the old website and she is strictly opposed to redirecting to the new website. She refuses to share the website password.

This is an immediate problem for us. Members of local societies are accustomed to going to the website to register for the annual banquet, but the old website doesn't have that.

I'm assuming that our current Web administrator understands our rights here, but can anyone hear provide advise?

Her (the former chair/old website admin) position doesn't seem openly malicious, just that "we" don't know what we are doing, that the new website isn't as good as the old one and that it's "best" if she maintains it the way it is.