[Chapter-delegates] ISOC Business Rules

[Vittorio Bertola]

Franck Martin ha scritto:
> With a free Global membership, I think cost is not the issue anymore. 

Is this a guarantee that global membership will be free forever?

I think that there should be a clause in these rules that recognizes the 
possibility for members joining through a chapter to opt out of any paid 
global membership. Members join ISOC Italy because they want to support 
our local activities, almost all of them are not interested in 
financially supporting the HQ (if they were, they'd have already joined 
the global supporting membership).

> I think we all know that Membership to ISOC for an individual is 
> mandatory before you are a Chapter Member. However we sometimes took the 
> liberty of not enforcing it, for the simple reason that fees collection 
> was real cumbersome and that sometimes we did not have the feeling of 
> participating in ISOC policy process. As a trustee, I wonder how many 
> chapters read the board minutes and provide feedback to trustees...

I think it's a matter of establishing better cooperation between the HQ 
and the chapters. Until now, apart from chapter people who were 
interested in getting to the Board of Trustees, there has not been much 
interaction between chapters and HQ. A better interaction will be 
valuable to everyone, as long as it is an interaction and not the HQ 
attempting to impose more and more rules onto chapters.

> With a free Global membership, I think cost is not the issue anymore. 
> Data privacy may be one, but then, ISOC follows privacy laws,

of which country?

Privacy is a highly sensitive matter for our members, and in general for 
everyone who is active over the Internet in Europe. I see it likely that 
many of them would not like their information to go to the US, where the 
protection granted by law is much lower than in Europe.

Could ISOC consider having a distributed system, storing the information 
  of European members (global and chapter) inside the EU?

> and if you 
> join, then you agree to a certain number of policies and even code of 
> ethics. This is something that will have to be even clearer on the new 
> membership system. I'm not even sure that hosting the data in Geneva is 
> the solution, because I think ISOC servers are not in Reston nor Geneva 
> but co-located where Internet is fast.

Geneva is not in the EU, anyway.

> Also, I'd like to point out, ISOC membership is unique, but take three 
> other organisations that shape the Internet:
> -www.ieee.org
> -www.itu.int
> -www.w3c.org
> 
> You will see that their membership rules are not as permissive as the 
> ISOC ones and everybody goes along with them.

But they are not mass organizations, and they deal with technical 
issues, not with sensitive policy and political ones.

> At the moment we have 20,000+ individual members, but I don't know if 
> ISOC can say they have the support of so many people. If we prune a bit, 
> so be it, as long as we keep the ones that support the whole of ISOC and 
> all its principles (no chery picking here or we may give up on say 
> freedom of speech on the Internet).

I would expect this to be a discussion. Saying, as you do, that if some 
members disagree with you then you're happy to force them to leave ISOC 
certainly makes me more concerned.

> We sure need to go via a transition period, but I don't see the new 
> membership system ready before the end of the year, so time to move step 
> by step and be involved in the whole process.

Ok, so can I please get answers to a few practical questions about how 
the new system would work:

- would all of our members be required to subscribe or renew their 
membership online, through the new system, or could we do it by other 
means (paper forms, shake of hands, emails to secretariat etc.) and then 
have our secretariat register the information into ISOC's database?

- when the rules say "Individuals are required to re-affirm periodically 
their ISOC Global and Chapter memberships", would the chapter be free to 
define how, or would that be through a procedure defined by the HQ?

- does the system support membership in more than one chapter at the 
same time?

- about rule 3.3, why don't you just say that ISOC will use Unicode for 
all its membership management activities?

- what does it matter to ISOC if someone's email address doesn't work 
any more?

Thanks,
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
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