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Following the
lead of my last Newsletter article (which talked about the value
of volunteers), I’m going to focus this article on a single
issue that is important at all levels of IEEE. This time I would
like to talk about membership in IEEE and NPSS. I’m not going
to dun you to become members—you are already IEEE and NPSS
members or you wouldn’t be getting this Newsletter! Instead,
I want to talk about why people become members and what kind of
benefits we can offer members.
Membership is generally considered to be a good thing. If an organization
has a large number of members, that indicates that it is doing things
that people consider to be important and is doing them well. IEEE
takes a lot of pride in the fact that it is the world’s largest
professional organization. A large membership roster also indicates
that we take care of our members—that we are giving them some
benefit that they value. Therefore, there is presently a bit of
concern because the number of members has held approximately steady
over the last few years, while the number of people attending NPSS
conferences and publishing in NPSS journals has grown.
Why do people join IEEE and NPSS? For some, it is to get a financial
benefit. When I joined NPSS, I could subscribe to my favorite journal
(in my case TNS) at a very low cost, and these tremendously valuable
journals would be sitting on my bookshelf any time that I needed
them. I didn’t have to take the ten-minute walk over to the
library to read up on the latest developments or to look up a paper.
Today I rarely walk to the library to read or copy a journal—I
download them at my desk. Since my institution has electronic subscriptions
to most of the journals that I need, my personal access is really
only of value when I am traveling or when there are the inevitable
hiccups with our institutional subscription. In short, while NPSS
still offers low cost publications to its members, it is a benefit
that has lost a lot of its value.
The other main monetary benefit is reduced registration fees at
conferences, but as my employer pays my registration fees, it doesn’t
really benefit me. There are some other monetary benefits of IEEE
membership, such as low cost insurance and an email alias service,
but for most people these are not compelling reasons to join the
IEEE and NPSS.
Yet, I have remained a member—why? Like many people, the reason
I stay a member of IEEE and NPSS is not financial. I think that
most people are members of IEEE and NPSS for the same sort of reason
that they are members of the Sierra Club, the PTA, or a church.
They believe that the work that IEEE and NPSS perform is both important
and done well, and they want to lend their support. They are members
because there is a community that they identify with and want to
be part of. They are members because they want to “give back”
to an organization. For some, it is like making a donation to a
charity.
I feel that these are good reasons for becoming a member. The IEEE
and NPSS are doing valuable work. I shudder to think what my profession
would be like if the IEEE / NPSS (and organizations like them) did
not sponsor conferences and journals. Conferences and journals do
not just happen—they take a tremendous amount of work and organization.
But when talking to a prospective member it can be difficult to
answer the question, “Why join NPSS?” A financial “deal”
is something that can be explained (and understood) very quickly.
The concepts of altruism, service, and community take much longer
to explain, and in many cases are never understood.
Could the NPSS offer monetary benefits that would be valuable to
members? We would certainly like to, but the NPSS AdCom has been
discussing this question for several years now without yet finding
a clearly viable answer. It is difficult to provide something that
is a monetary deal—we can’t offer to give members something
that costs us more than the membership fee! We already provide the
things that we produce (publications and conferences) to members
“at cost,” but the value of these items to individual
members is decreasing for the reasons above. And because we are
a service organization, many of the valuable things that we provide
(such as the ability to present at conferences or publish in journals)
are open to both members and non-members. By being altruistic and
serving the entire profession (instead of just our members), we
lose a lot of opportunities to treat our members specially.
Maybe the way to encourage membership is to lower the membership
fee to the point where it is insignificant (i.e., reduce the barrier
to becoming a member)? Unfortunately, this would be fiscally irresponsible.
The NPSS has no control over the IEEE membership fee and the NPSS
membership fee is already too low (it does not quite cover the cost
to maintain membership rolls, run the various elections, create
and mail you this Newsletter, etc.), so cutting the total membership
cost by a significant factor is out of the question. Some discussions
have gone in a diametrically opposite direction and debated whether
we need any members! Could we not serve the community by organizing
conferences, publishing journals, etc., but not have any members?
We serve the community (whether they are members or not), and many
people who are not members still contribute to IEEE and NPSS by
helping organize our conferences or reviewing articles for our journals.
While this scenario does not feel right to me (by definition, an
organization needs to have some minimum number of people who are
a part of it), I have a hard time arguing against it on more than
a gut level.
The IEEE and NPSS are wrestling with these and similar issues. As
the previous paragraphs surely show, we have more questions and
desires than we have answers. We are concerned about membership
and serving our members. Our top priority is to keep the IEEE and
NPSS communities strong and help them serve the profession. We would
like to keep the cost for membership reasonable, especially for
people early in their careers and others that have financial constraints,
and we would like to show our members that we appreciate them by
offering benefits that they value. Yet we cannot spin straw into
gold, and so we cannot do all the things that we would like to do.
If you have any thoughts on these or any other issues, please feel
free to contact me.
Bill Moses can be reached at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
MS 55-121, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720-8099 USA; E-mail:
wwmoses@lbl.gov.
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