[Chapter-delegates] Problems with new membership system

[Greg Shatan]

All,

The New York Chapter is experiencing the same difficulties. However, I do
believe we were warned that, if members did not opt in during the opt in
process, they would be deleted from the database and their membership in
the Internet Society and any chapters terminated.

It’s unclear to me whether only those members were deleted. Regardless, we
lost a massive amount of members. If they were deadwood, that seems like a
correct result, but it seems like there were some live ones in among the
deadwood.

Whether it was legally necessary to go the opt in route is a fun question,
but also an absolutely moot point, since it’s all been done (over many
months with repeated warnings, emails and exhortations).

Another anomaly: There were also members listed in the old database with
expiration dates. I believe they stayed in the database even after the
expiration date, and it appears that some of these expired members did opt
in, so they survived the transition to the new database. These members are
now flagged as inactive (or words to that effect). It’s unclear to me how
these should be (or should have been) dealt with.

Those who opted in but declined to receive email (was that even an option?)
are even more of a head scratcher. Email is our only official line of
communication with members — sure they can visit our website, Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., but that is not the same thing.

While we’re at it, the listing of “Roles” for Chapter leadership is very
limited. Anyone who had a role in the old database that doesn’t exist in
the new database was converted to “officer”. This happened to our
representatives to ICANN At -Large and NCSG/NCUC, as well as liaisons from
ICANN and from another organization — none of these people (with one
exception) are in fact “officers” of the Chapter or our Corporation.

Perhaps this was a “live beta”....

Best regards,

Greg
On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 2:20 PM Y.Kargapolov <yvk2010 at gmail.com> wrote:

> +1 Ram
>
> This is the most reasonable move in the current situation.
>
> --
> Yuri
> ISOC IoT SIG
>
> Вы писали 13 февраля 2019 г., 18:56:04:
>
>
> ISOC should consider reinstating the old AMS so that chapters can get back
> to functioning, download CSVs, etc., since the assumption that there would
> be fidelity in cross-over is not reality.
>
> This approach allows ISOC tech staff the time to identify root cause(s)
> and troubleshoot issues on the new system and test it without impacting
> chapters worldwide in their core operations.
>
> -Ram
>
> *From:* Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond <ocl at gih.com>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, February 12, 2019 12:09 PM
> *To:* Chapter Delegates <Chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org>
> *Subject:* [Chapter-delegates] Problems with new membership system
>
> 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) <yvk2010 at gmail.com>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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