Membership Working Group - IAInstituteProjects

The group formerly known as PricingForDevelopingCountries...

The Membership Recommendation Working Group

OVERVIEW: Scope, Goals and Objectives

The goal of this working group is to propose a plan for a membership scheme for AIfIA. This scheme should take into account and be supportive of AIfIA’s mission and needs, as well as the necessities of its current and potential members.

The scope of this proposal relates the financial, economical and technical necessities of current and potential AIfIA members and the steps required to adequate AIfIA’s membership types and sign up processes to these groups.

Our main focus is to address the economic disparities between the developed world and developing countries, as well as student needs. Specifically our objectives are:

To support AIfIA's goal of forming a global network of Information Architects and develop a community infrastructure that supports communication and collaboration between its members worldwide.
To encourage professionals in developing countries to join AIfIA through more accessible membership fees;
To encourage students to get involved in AIfIA and participate actively in the building and strengthening of the Information Architecture field.
To facilitates the membership sign-up process and support member’s requests.

PROPOSAL: Group History and Methodology

This working group started out discussing the need to adequate the membership prices to individuals residing in developing countries around the world. We conducted background research on different pricing models from several institutions and associations with similar characteristics to AIfIA, paying special attention to membership rates for members from developing countries and students, to analyze what were the best practices among professional international organizations.

An initial recommendation was compiled and submitted it to AIfIA’s Leadership Council who evaluated the proposal and provided us with feedback. After analyzing our members’ characteristics and the needs of prospect members further, it became clear that this scope needed to be broadened to truly support AIfIA’s mission in serving a larger community of practice.

We then extended our research to address the needs of students in more detail and the possibilities in approaching student organizations and academic programs, as well as identifying what are the members and potential members’ expectations towards AIfIA and its membership system.

The final result of this research and the collective effort of this group were compiled as a recommendation, which is now being reviewed by the Leadership Board. We should point out though that fee structure is inextricably linked with issues of who the organization is seeking as its members and while our recommendations are limited to fees, they do have an indirect impact on how organization grows.

For this reason, we recommend this working group to periodically unite and review the impacts of the membership system and how it is assisting AIfIA’s goals and supporting member’s initiatives.

STATUS: What we've been up to

July 16, 2003: [Recommendation] approved by Leadership Council
June 27, 2003: Recommendation resubmitted to the Leadership Council (version 2.0)
June 15, 2003: Recommendation updated to reflect feedbacks (version 1.1)
- Corporate Memberships became Organizational Memberships
- Students will be asked to fill out questions relevant to AIfIA's work
- Academic Programs will be approached to encourage student group sign-ups (as Organizational Memberships)
June 02, 2003: Recommendation finalized and delivered to the Leadership Council
May 26, 2003: Draft 1.2 completed
May 25, 2003: Draft 1.1 completed
May 24, 2003: Draft 1.0 completed

STAFF: Volunteers

Livia Labate
Rashmi Sinha
Peter Van Dijck

REFERENCES

http://www.worldbank.org/prospects/gep2003/

http://www.worldbank.org/data/countryclass/countryclass.html

http://www.worldbank.org/data/countryclass/classgroups.htm

http://friends.icograda.org/web/join.shtml

http://www.acm.org/membership/L2-3/

http://www.siam.org/membership/outreachdesc.htm

http://www.siam.org/membership/outreachlist.htm

http://www.setac.org/member.html

http://www.wisc.edu/uwcc/icic/orgs/ica/pubs/review/vol-88/member.html

http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0797/11982.html

http://www.thoracic.org/membership/guestsub.asp

http://www.iabm.org/Developing_countries.htm

http://www.ams.org/membership

http://www.reading.org/membership/devel_countries.html

http://www.globaltreatmentaccess.org/content/press_releases/a02/060602_UPI_HGAP_phrma.html

http://www.reading.org/membership/pricing.html

http://publications.worldbank.org/discounts

http://ifs.apdi.net/imf/prepurchase.asp

http://www.cas.usf.edu/lis/lis6511/week4/pricing.htm

http://www.alexanderstreetpress.com/articles/article02.htm

http://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/devel/default.html

DELIVERABLES: The 'to do' list

Evaluate the possibility of different membership prices for developing countries [done]
Memberships Benchmarking [done]
Study country selection method [done]
Define Membership model [done]
Create a membership matrix [done]
Present a Membership Recommendation [done]
make one recommendation and secondary options [done]
how it works (the rules) [done]
how we implement it (practical) [done]
create a Proposed Rate Matrix [done]
incorporate matrix into registration process
verify country of residence
why offer student memberships? [done]
why offer special memberships for developing countries? [done]
free memberships? [done]
students in developing countries might not have credit cards [done]
what are the benefits of this for AIfIA? [done]
payments in US$ only. [done]
- avoid being affected by currency fluctuation. [done]
- administrative annoyance [done]
how to avoid fraud? [done]
AIfIA is a networking opportunity for many people [done]
negative peer perception [done]
analysis of implications. [done]
what makes sense for AIfIA as an organization. [done]
rank based on person's earnings in Euros. (peter morville's suggestion) [done]
Our Audience: professionals & students [done]
- what IA professional is not a student? [done]
- what student who is not a professional would join AIfIA? [done]
what constitues a developing country [done]
explain by comparison [done]
explain through example [done]
how much the fee should be [done]
why this won't mean additional processing workload for aifia [done]
who will develop the content to be put on the site [done]

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