[Chapter-delegates] Membership System is not working!!!

[Alan Levin]

Dear President, Chairman and chapter delegates,

I trust this email finds you all well, please accept my warmest  
greetings to you all.

Franck, many thanks for raising this. I concur with and support your  
feelings and comments.

On 25 Jan 2006, at 2:49 AM, Franck Martin wrote:
> I understand ISOC difficulties since Nelson and Anne have left, but  
> the
> membership is our lifeblood. This is the critical function ISOC has to
> maintain. Thanks again into look it into it.

ISOC-ZA has experienced the same problems with the new membership  
system. It's unfortunate that I have to deal with this myself and as  
such I haven't had the time to try and work out what the problem is  
or write an eloquently detailed report.  Apologies... the reason why  
I have to do it is basically because no-one else in ISOC-ZA is  
interested in dealing with the mess of systems....

Bottom line is that we used to get 3-8 new subscribers per week and  
since Sept 30, 2005 we have not received a single email.

> This is not the first communication about the membership system we had
> with ISOC staff. Beleive me!

So true. Mr Chairman, Ms President, subsequent to all the complaints  
from most of the chapters that have used the system, I hope that you  
and the board may consider scrapping the current solution and  
starting again. It is really a very poor system and doesn't appear to  
fit the ISOC culture or ISOC principles; standards, rigor, peer  
review and community (these issues can't be fixed without starting  
again). We have provided detailed feedback during the implementation  
process and many issues were 'flagged' for future rollout/fixes. I  
suspect that we'll be spending most of the time reporting bugs with  
the current system and won't ever reach the flagged improvements.

Allow me to explain how this works for ISOC-ZA and many (most of) the  
other chapters that I've spoken to.
- we have a spreadsheet where we keep our members information (since  
there are many not on the global system, some are on the global  
system but cannot be local members because their email addresses  
bounce, and we need to have a local accessible list)
- we instruct all new members to complete the form on the isoc.org  
main website
- we (used to) get emails from that form and copy and paste into our  
spreadsheet
- we then added them to our ISOC-ZA announce (majordomo) list
- occasionally we have to add members ourselves (since some people  
don't proactively send out emails or know how list servers work, or  
have confidence in web forms), and that requires three systems that  
are separate and need manual interface
- There are 401 members on ISOC-ZA_announce majordomo, 412 members in  
our spreadsheet and 196 ISOC-ZA members in the global system (so you  
can imagine what it takes to try to sync).

The main issue is managing a membership database that's distinct and  
not integrated with the mailing lists and global database. It's  
better when there are dozens of members than when there are many  
hundreds. We'll have to employ someone to do this if we reach  
thousands...

Lastly and most importantly, please could you advise when will this  
problem be fixed? (if need be we can put up our own membership  
application form in the interim, so please send us a date asap).

kind thanks for your attention,

aLan
chair isoc-za

---------------------------------------------
Alan Levin
Tel: +27 21 409-7997