Yesterday when GoToMeeting crashed I asked Conrad for ideas on membership (so that we could use it in the resusitated meeting) and I quote below what he wrote:
Hi Brian,
Thank you for your note. This is a good conversation in which to involve the whole marketing committee.
What does member mean?
Because WGI has chosen to be a corporation with voting members, there is no room for adjusting the consequence of being a member. That is, all members vote. So that leaves us with three questions for sure:
1. How does someone qualify as a member?
2. How does a member vote?
3. What constitutes a quorum?
Question #2 is easiest to answer. Members may vote in person or by electronic submission. This allows votes to be conducted at conferences, and by referendum.
The mechanism for voting is Wishlist Member. It already has this functionality. A member logs into the site, casts their vote, and then cannot access the voting page again. It is then up to the member to ensure they do not share their login information with anyone else.
Question #3 is slightly harder to answer. The difficulty is ensuring engagement with members so they want to vote. I recommend not even trying to define what makes a quorum until after we’ve had time to engage the existing membership in conversation via e-mail and the new site. Simply run with what’s working for now, and plan to do a test run of a new process in 2016 at the conference.
Question #1 already has an answer. I become a member by going to the WGI site and joining. Simple – or maybe not.
Rather than run through all the possible scenarios, let’s go straight to the heart of the matter.
The ideal solution is for all issues of membership to run through WGI. Every time someone joins WGI, the transaction runs through the WGI site. This makes a person a member of WGI and a member of the applicable national affiliate. Where there is no national affiliate, all the funds remain with WGI.
Two things are likely to be required to make this work:
a. The fee for basic WGI membership will remain at $20, and perhaps be less
b. WGI must develop other streams of income that include higher membership fees
This is a good beginning for the conversation. Thank you for getting it started, Brian.
For now, let’s have this starting point in our minds. There is quite a bit of other work that needs to be completed before we get into a protracted conversation about membership. Indeed, some of the other work is going to help fill in details for this conversation.
Thank you to everyone for taking time to read this through. It’s an interesting conversation, and I’m sure we’ll have lots of discussion when it times to revisit this topic.
Sincerely,
Conrad Hall