[Chapter-delegates] Fwd: Proposed agenda for ISOC CEO and ISOC UK England Leadership Team meeting - 20 Feb 2024

[Klaus Birkenbihl]

Dear Chapter Delegates,

first of all: thx to Olivier and his Chapter fellows for compiling and asking this set of great questions.

Joly MacFie via Chapter-delegates wrote on 09.02.24 16:51:
>
>     it is clear that the new Chapter
>     Membership Administration System is failing to achieve the functions it
>     was meant to achieve:
>     a. emailing members
>     b. hosting fora for community discussions like the Chapter Advisory
>     Council discussions and other fora
>
>
> Well, not totally clear. As Admin and Communications officer of ISOC-DC I have been using Fonteva for weekly emails to our membership, The Interplanetary Chapter also sends out regular emails. Once mastered, it is relatively easy, and I love that the -TR journey actually reaches the Chapter's entire membership, something Membernova never did. Yes, it needs improvement, Veni's request for translated subjects, for example, but it's not broken.

We don't live in the middle ages. And we should not expect ISOCians  to get too enthusiastic about a monolithic feature monster, just because few of the features are working.

The oldies among us may remember times when ISOC was seen as the place where people knew, how Internet technology can and should be used to build a network of networks. ISOC told the world how open standards, interoperability, running code ... (you name it) can be used  to build and maintain the biggest network ever and how to keep it open for everyone. ISOC provided a bridge between technology and society.

Compared to this, setting up a system for membership administration (AMS) should be an easy thing - given the availability of all the standards, (mostly open source) tools, and the knowledge the Internet holds. Wouldn't it be fair to expect that an AMS follows the same principles of openness and standard conformance? (Recently Christian de Larrinaga used the nerdy "eat your own dog food" analogy to ask for this). Well, maybe commissioning agencies with completely different mindset and skills is not the best way to achieve this.

Unfortunately this is not only a matter of credibility. It is also a matter of respecting the work of those chapters who managed to run a working membership administration for years. Since 2011 (12+ years now!) ISOC fails to provide an AMS interface to exchange members data. The only way to get/feed data from/to the various AMSs was and is "point/click/type". So quite some - error prone - manual work was and is required to keep working Chapter members administrations in sync with poorly working ISOC's AMSs.

The good news: it costs ISOC nothing. Because - of course - it is not payed ISOC staff who is expected to provide the required additional work but ... guess who?

So let's not be overly grateful.

Klaus

PS.: Recently the "Please Review Your New Chapter Membership Application" mails stopped working. AFAIK it was the only modest messaging of members data from ISOC to Chapters. And - after applying some -sort of- AI - it could be used for automatic processing of Chapter membership applications coming from ISOC. (A fix was promised.)

-- 
Klaus Birkenbihl
Internet Society German Chapter (ISOC.DE) e.V.
c/o ict-Media GmbH
https://www.isoc.de
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