okay, having come late to this one I'm finding it a bit hard to establish exactly what's going on, what's been decided etc. I could wade through those daunting 150 posts but wondered if anyone would care to summarize?

*confused*

Can we have a show of hands. All in favour of the name Heritage Action say 'aye'...

Just wanted to put in an enthusiastic word of praise for useless and inconsequential ramblings. Choosing a name and strapline was always going to take a long time but it's worth persisting. I suspect this acorn will grow big as there's a yawning gap in the market for a popular conservation movement so what we decide does matter, and the name etc will flavour the whole structure and philosophy of the thing in future, so a week of babbling won't hurt if we get it right in the end and settling for just anything for the sake of progressing would be a shame.
The trouble is, unlike with Stonehengineers, there may not be an ideal solution waiting to emerge. But to progress things, can I suggest we first settle the absolutely essential key words that must go in the title, rather than an actual title, assuming a length of 2 - 4 words?
My vote is this: Heritage and Action.
(Any other words, in my opinion, can go in the strapline and we can discuss it later).

There are 2 visions for this:

(A.) The organization as a centralised entity
...great for minimising the risk that loose cannons might ruin our reputation but also necessitating a high degree of sustained enthusiasm from people willing to run it, and carrying a chance we could get bureaucratic/inefficient and liable to tensions between rulers and ruled.

(B) The organization as I originally had in mind (without thinking about it too much admittedly) - a modest attempt to set up a community based facility, under a single banner to enable people singly or in groups to publicise and run their own campaigns, putting in as much or as little time and effort as they wished. User friendly and efficient, but with a high risk of being discredited.

We have to choose something between those two parameters.

My preference is for my original idea, but tightened up by means of control mainly through the pre-published rules. That's not as safe as having a committee vetting everything but still, "keep to them or bugger off" ought to be enough for most purposes. After all, we mustn't forget we're only talking about selected conservationists here, not delinquents. I know we'll need a bit of admin here and there but I'd seen it essentially as a platform - in fact The Heritage Action Platform isn't a bad title.

When ES talked of "legal, secretarial, fund raising and publicity" functions and an "Executive of 3 - 5 people" I realised that what he, and others - perhaps a majority - has picked up wasn't a laid back useful federation but a go-getting fighting machine with a formal structure. I can see that resources like that would be good for big ongoing fights like Thornborough, but for the other sorts of activities, small scale hassling of NT and EH they'd be an irrelevant burden. I don't need no secretarial or legal help to write letters and I certainly don't want to run my stuff past an Executive. It's not that I'm arrogant, it's just that it wouldn't be fun. So what I'm saying is -beware bureaucracy, it DOES make things less pleasant, and if you must have some don't let it encroach on the small entrepreneur.

Slowly losing the will to live trawling through the threads.......
However HA gets my vote. How about "Protecting the future of the past" as the strap line? Just a touch of the Millitant about it perhaps?

Has the name game defeated us? 'Cos there's a lot needs doing out there.

Picked this up on the Portal's newspage:

"Archaeologists and local volunteers have revealed a significant area of Romano-British settlement as well as evidence for Neolithic and Bronze Age activity between Warborough, Benson and Berrick Salome on land threatened by sand and gravel extraction in the Oxfordshire County Council Draft Structure Plan."