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Gene brought up a lot of good points. So now I guess I'll finally
throw my $0.02 worth into the mix.
First, I'm conflicted about it, and not for the reasons anyone might
suspect.
- - Part of me thinks it's a completely horrible idea (which I'll get
into), but
- - Part of me wants the organization to move forward with it, on the
off-chance that I might be able to make a claim that I paid to be a
member and I don't want to be a sponsor, and I can get a refund for
dues paid
Second, the proposal has all sorts of things it needs to account for:
- - One of the things we learned, early on, from both corporate sponsors
and from the association-management folks at AH, was that "member
numbers" were a meaningless metric to corp. sponsors if membership was
free. Because they are trivially inflated. So if the goal is to do
this to grow the member numbers, to increase sponsorship
opportunities, then it is horribly misguided.
- - The by-laws will require a fairly comprehensive overhaul in order to
make it work
- - You'll have a member-based organization where you literally "pay to
vote" (unless you're going to let non-paying members vote in which
case, boy howdy, elections could be very very fun to watch...) This
doesn't seem to be in keeping with the egalitarian nature we have
historically tried to assert for the organization
Third, if the Board is seriously considering slashing the
organization's primary revenue stream -- at the first time in LOPSA's
history when the monies collected as dues can finally go 100% towards
the actual operation of the organization, instead of debt clearance --
then that is something which should haunt every single Board member
who supports this, come the next election.
Lastly, I'm going to throw something out there that a lot of people
aren't going to want to hear, and frankly which I don't even want to
really say, but which needs saying at this point:
LOPSA IS A FAILURE
I say this as someone who signed up as a paid member on Day One, as a
founding sponsor, and a former board member. So I am not someone who
wants to be "a LOPSA naysayer", I am simply being pragmatic at this point.
This fall will mark the 10 year birthday of LOPSA, and it has
accomplished - literally - nothing that couldn't have been
accomplished under the USENIX/SAGE banner of yore. Except that it's
done so with a lot more overhead, a lot more grumbling, years of
inter-organizational bad-blood, and a lot of person-hours spent by
volunteers that resulted in precious little.
As Gene points out, the discounts given by various "sponsors" are
little different than is available to informal user-groups, or other
organizations. Our list of "member benefits" is nothing that couldn't
be done without the org structure (IRC channels? mailing lists?)
It's a joke. It's a joke that every incoming board has had lofty goals
of changing, all without success (and I include myself in that). How
many of these platitudes do you remember hearing during more than one
election cycle?
- We need to reach out to other communities and build the membership
- We need to think creatively to come up with other cost-effective
benefits we can offer members
- We need to work on a better answer to the question of "Why should I
become a member?"
At this point, I strongly believe we should consider working with
USENIX to move LOPSA's biggest successes - the mentoring program and
the local conferences, to operate directly under the USENIX banner
(although with LOPSA-East taking an unplanned hiatus, and the
financial peril that CasIT faces according to the Jan-12 minutes[1],
perhaps it's just the mentoring program at this point). Afterwards,
maybe it's time to think of what LOPSA's exit strategy is, and ponder
the "D" word ... dissolution.
There's a lot of folks here with very strong emotional attachment to
LOPSA, and I get it. But looking at it clinically: it's time to take
the org off the ventilator. To let it die as gracefully as possible
at this point.
And with that, I'll get off the soapbox...
D
[1]
http://governance.lopsa.org/Board_meeting_Minutes/12_Jan_2015#Cascadia..._.28Ski.29
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