REPORT FROM THE CHAPTER AND MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEES

Vernon G. Price Chair, NPSS Chapter and Membership Development Committees

To promote a more transnational membership, the IEEE has made membership expansion outside the United States a high priority. Because of this effort, growth in Regions 7 through 10 exceeds that of Regions 1 through 6 both in IEEE and in total membership within the constituent societies. According to IEEE leaders, a productive way to expand membership is by encouraging the formation of society chapters in the “outer regions.” Local chapters gain a distinct advantage because local entities of IEEE are able to advertise and conduct chapter or section meetings in the languages spoken by their members. These entities then have a sense of belonging to a truly transnational organization.

At the invitation of NPSS AdCom, I gave a presentation at the Region 8 Division IV Chapter meeting held in Leuven Belgium in October 1999 and attended the 1999 RADECS conference in Fontevraud France. At Fontevraud (a medieval Chateau in the Loire region), I found a strong interest in establishing a local NPSS chapter. Attending the conference was a group of highly qualified and motivated French scientists and engineers who would be willing and able to form a local chapter. If one can be established, we will then have chapters of NPSS in France and in Germany. (Other transnational chapters of NPSS include a semi-active chapter in India and one in Japan).

As I pointed out in my presentation at Leuven, our Society has fundamental problems in Chapter activity because of the nature of our organization. We have a nominal membership (approximately 3000) that has remained constant over more than a decade. Our membership interests span eight divergent technical fields including:

• Radiation Effects
• Fusion Technology
• Plasma Sciences
• Particle Accelerator Science
• Nuclear Medical Imaging Sciences
• Nuclear Instruments and Detectors
• Pulsed Power Science
• Computer Applications in Nuclear and Plasma Sciences
• Radiation Instrumentation

Though each interest could represent a separate society of IEEE, the number of people involved in each would be too small to permit such a choice. Some interests may attract 500 of our members while others may attract only 200 to 300. Members who work in one of the technical NPSS interests often have little interest in others. This differentiation makes operating the NPSS chapters difficult. Even so, the above technical interests conduct successful annual conferences and symposia often attracting 500 to 1000 participants. Typically, more than half of the attendees in the conferences are not IEEE/NPSS members. The papers presented are published in our high-quality transactions or workshop records and are distributed to our members.

How is this related to Chapter activities? Consider the following factors:

• Based upon my experience of about 5 years as an NPSS chapter officer, I have observed that less than 20% of the local chapter population attends the chapter meetings. The low attendance is caused by such things as traffic, competing demands upon members’ time, diverging interests, etc.
• In our society, fewer than 20 people come to our chapter meetings. This number seems to be independent of the quality of the featured speaker or of the subject matter of the talk. Chapter officers try to offer meeting presentations that alternate among the society’s technical interests described earlier. In order to bolster attendance, tours to visit local laboratories in which some technical interest is observable are sometimes arranged and it is not unusual to schedule presentations of general scientific interest not specific to NPSS.
• Chapter meetings attendees include both NPSS members and non-members. The non-members, about half of the total, may be friends of the speaker or are local residents who learn of the meetings through advertisements. Providing information to non-technical residents is an important function of society chapters. Included among the 10 NPSS members in a typical audience, three or four are the chapter officers. The six or seven non-officer NPSS attendees often attend because of their technical interest in the presentation and would not likely attend if the subject reflected another NPSS interest. When chapter officers attempt to cover each of our technical interests in successive meetings, different NPSS members will be in attendance at each meeting. This makes it difficult for the officers to arrange for succession in their leadership roles. The result is that they remain in office year after year until “burn-out” takes over.
• We have found that a chapter must have at least 50 members within a demographic chapter area in order to be viable over even a short period of time unless arrangements are made to provide for joint operation with nearby “like-minded” IEEE societies. A review of SAMIeee data for NPSS shows that our members are scattered thinly throughout the world. Some areas, such as the Oakland (California) East Bay have more than 100 members. With this number and with good officers, they’ve been able to conduct a successful NPSS chapter for several years.

Considering the above observations, how can we help the French or other transnationals set up chapters? My first step for establishing a chapter in France was to contact Dr. Maurice Papo, an IEEE leader who is very familiar with Region 8 SAMIeee data. France is divided into some 98 Départements (roughly analogous to US states or Canadian provinces). He sorted the French members by the first two digits of their postal codes-since those digits represent the Département where the members reside-and based the sort upon active membership in NPSS. We have about 70 active and 34 inactive members of NPSS in France. These people are thinly distributed over some 20 Départements. He found, however, that Département 31 (Haute Garonne, including the city Toulouse has 12 active members and that Département 91 (Essonne, near Paris) has 17 active members. There are a total of 197 IEEE members near Toulouse and more than 600 members near Paris. With such numbers, it seems reasonable to launch a chapter of NPSS in the Paris region and, once established, encourage the leaders to combine their efforts with some other IEEE society entity to make the operation viable. It is interesting to note that one of our NPSS scientists working in Italy approached me at the RADECS meeting to say that he would also like to establish a chapter in his country.

To move forward in this venture in France, a letter (composed in French) needs to be sent to the existing, active members inviting the endorsement of 12 members to the petition. IEEE Headquarters can then approve the establishment of a local chapter. These 12 individuals can be any of the current 72 active members in France. With the annual Nuclear Science Symposium/Medical Imaging Conference scheduled to take place this Fall in Lyon, France, it will be important to have a local French chapter in good operation able to participate in such a historic event.

Vernon Price, Chair of the NPSS Chapter and Membership Development Committees, may be reached at 22151 Berkeley Court, Los Altos, CA 94024-7452; Phone (408) 737-0778; Fax: (408) 737-1922; E-mail: v.price@ieee.org.

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