ISOC Document 95-066a

Title:	Individual Membership
Author(s): 	Tim O'Reilly
Date:       1995.11.14
Body:      	Board of Trustees
Document:  	95-066a
Revision:
Supersedes:	basic
Status:
Maintainer:	Tim O'Reilly
Access:      unrestricted

At the last Trustee's meeting, I heard a lot of people saying "we want to be 
an individual membership organization rather than an industry association."  
However, as I raised at the time, there's a big difference between a 
professional association (which ISOC now is) and a "mass membership 
organization" (the term that several people were throwing around at the 
meeting.)

As the recent DNS proposal debate has highlighted, mass membership can be a 
powerful source of legitimacy.  ("How can you say you speak for the Internet 
when you have only 5000 members and there are 100,000 domains in .com?")

I'd like to ask the question definitively:  are we a professional society, or 
do we want to be a true mass membership organization?

If the latter, this needs to be a major focus of the society, with very 
ambitious goals.

In this context, I should add that I asked the same question of the EFF, of 
which I am also a trustee.  They answered in the affirmative (as I think did 
the ISOC board), and have proceeded to act on it.  They have set the target of 
1,000,000 members (yes, that's 1,000,000) in 1996, and have persuaded Regis
McKenna to work with them on the logistics side.

I haven't heard the details...but I do know that this is a major committment, 
largely driven by direct mail (although as you know I also think it could be 
driven by web-based advertising, relationships with Internet Service 
Providers, etc.)  My conversations with the Nature Conservancy (800,000 
members) have given me some perspective on the kinds of things that need to be 
done, but clearly, a lot more research would be needed as well.

I myself am ambivalent about this prospect.  While I think in theory it is a 
really great vision for the Internet to be "owned" by its users, rather than 
by national governments, service providedrs, or telcos, and I can see the 
Internet Society, with its avowed mission of holding the legal umbrella for 
the internet standards process and various other tangible connections between 
the Internet and the "real world", as a possible candidate for this role,
I wonder if in practice the organization's history of flawed relationships 
with other parties might ultimately disqualify it. In any event, I'd like to 
raise the issue again, and if the answer is yes, to investigate the 
consequences, in terms of whom we hire for the CEO position, and the types of
committments we'd need to make to get this process off the ground.