[Chapter-delegates] Problems with new membership system

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

Hello all,

I'd be interested in your comments, as I have realised (from the
feedback received on today's Chapter Advisory Council Steering
Committee) that the UK Chapter is not the only Chapter with Membership
software problems. Throughout the week, I have been grappling with
various problems brought forward by the new Internet Society membership
system.

Leaving small problems to the side, there are two main problems that the
Internet Society UK England Chapter is facing:

1. The inability to download a list of all our members in Excel format.
When we started using the ISOC AMS system, we transferred all of our
member's details to the AMS. We even registered with the Data Protection
Registrar, in case the details were going to be leaving the UK. Whilst
the Internet Society runs the AMS system, we believe that we are the
data controller. Now we cannot retrieve the data of our own members and
the question comes as to "who owns members"? I remember this debate
poisoned discussions in early 2000 when the Internet Society was about
to collapse for lack of funds and at the end of the day, the matter was
dug into the ground and full access to the membership records given to
the Chapters about their own members. Now the new system makes things a
lot harder for the Chapter to view and download records of its own
members. This simply cannot be the case.

2. Emailing members using the system: here there are two main problems:
first, it is now impossible to email a subset of our members, it's
either all of them, or 1 of them, but there is no ability to select a
subset of members, for example living in town X, and email them.
Functionality loss - which I had already pointed out during the
demonstration calls a few months ago, but it appears that someone has
deliberately decided to ignore this important feature. That's a
technical thing that should be fixed easily.

The second problem, possibly more of a problem because I do not think
that it is technical, but is a "feature" that was added, is that we now
appear not to be able to email all of our members. With the decision of
ISOC to go through the toughest regimes of GDPR acceptance by asking for
explicit acceptance of GDPR terms, we went from 3400 to 1490 members.
Whilst this is a pill that's difficult to swallow, I understand the
purpose and conservative direction that ISOC took for this - the culture
of "safety first" prevailing these days. That said, we now have another
challenge, in that out of these 1490 members, we appear to only be able
to email 1098 of them - because it appears that 400 of our "members"
have "decided not to receive emails".
First, I think that the email opt out button is very badly marked, as it
cuts you off all communication and signs you off all of the mailing
lists that you might have subscribed to. In my test, I have managed to
sign myself off email mailing lists without being able to find a way to
put myself back on them - for example the Internet Policy..... But worse
still, I have found that my own colleagues in the leadership team have
opted out of emails - perhaps unwittingly.

What good is a Chapter member that opts out of emails?

How in the world will I get in touch with members that have opted out of
emails? Are these people completely cut-off from the Internet Society?
Are they receiving *any* communication at all from the Internet Society,
or is it only the Chapter that is blocked from being able to email them?
Do they know they have opted out?
To me, these 400 people that the Chapter cannot email are as good as
dead wood - why not remove them from Internet Society membership as well?

I'd be interested in your comments if you are faced with similar problems.
Kindest regards,

Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond
(personal views)
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