It is truly fascinating to see the concern for the welfare of the
Society. This seems to have always been a driving force within our Society as
well as within other entities of the IEEE. Perhaps this is true for other volunteer organizations as well. A special circumstance in our case is that the relatively small number of active volunteers, who are called upon to manage the affairs of the Society, do not have much of a clue about the desires and concerns of the thousands of members out there who constitute the body of our organization and whose interests they have the mission to serve.
So, the polling of the members is a reasonable, although not so simple, tool for obtaining feedback. Let us travel through time back to the year 1979. The first meeting of the year of the Board of Governors is taking place and there are two important items of business (other than the usual). One has to do with the concerns of one of the most activist Presidents of our Society, Fred Jelinek, who, by this time, was Past President and responsible for membership affairs. He observed a small but somewhat steady decline in the total number of Society (then Group) members. Allow me to digress for a moment to mention one of the most creative proposals of his before I forget it. He actually proposed that the Society make a movie about the development of Information Theory. His suggestion was approved and he was charged with investigating further but the records do not show any subsequent information or activity toward this goal. Perhaps somber realism set in at some point during the exploration of the possibilities.
But let's go back to the concern for the declining membership. A committee had been appointed, with Fred as chairman, to investigate the issue. And, of course, the committee proceeded to conduct a $\ldots$ survey. This time, the survey was limited in scope. It posed only a few key questions, all related to membership. It was mailed to a semi-randomly selected group of 100 past and 100 present members. It was semi-random (don't ask me to define the term -- this is how it was characterized by the committee) because the selected names were the first 100 in alphabetical order. Twenty-seven replies were received from past and 28 from present members.
The first question asked how important the desire to receive the {\it IT Transactions} was, as a factor in joining the Society. Almost all respondents said ``very" or ``absolutely." Yet 8 of them said ``very little." However, a terse statement in the minutes dismisses that response as reflecting a misunderstanding of the question. The second question asked those who had dropped out to explain why they did so. Sixteen reported a change in their own interests, 3 claimed a change in the Society's interests, 5 said they had to because of a recent dues increase, and the remaining checked the box labeled ``other." The next question was how well did the Society meet the members' needs. Four said ``excellent," 5 ``above average," 12 ``average," 4 ``below average," and 2 were ready to drop membership.
The following question tried to correlate dues levels with membership. While only 3 out of 23 who had quit would have stayed if the dues were $2.00 lower, 5 of 21 would have dropped out sooner if the dues were $2.00 higher. Of the present members at the time, 16\% would drop out if the dues were to be raised by $2.00. \medskip\par Members were asked to comment on how they perceived the quality of the IT Transactions. Here are some responses: ``Articles are seldom readable," ``Papers should be carefully reviewed to eliminate those of no substantive value"(!), ``Downplay derivations and proofs," ``More ... hardware"(!!), ``More tutorial papers,"
On the Newsletter, only a few cared to comment but their assessment of it was mostly ``excellent" or ``OK." One response was ``Fire the Editor"!
Finally, in the last ``catch-all" question that invited the respondents to make any kind of suggestion they wished, an anthology of responses revealed the timelessness of the concerns. Members asked for more papers of broad interest and complained about almost everything under the sun (from lack of papers on sonar(!) to too much coverage of Soviet-American relations in the Newsletter).
The interesting conclusion of the report was that there was basically no real reason for concern and that everything was, more or less, OK. Interestingly, among the present members responding, 11 were from academia, 12 from industry, and 4 from government, while among past members the distribution was 2,19,4. Also, the primary activity of present members was theoretical reasearch (11), experimental research (11), development (12), and other(?) (7). Among past members, the split was 1,4,17,8. Some obvious conclusions were indeed drawn from these data.
The other major topic of discussion was the report of the Treasurer (the post being held at the time by$\ldots$ yours truly) that we were accumulating significant surpluses. It was felt that wealth accumulation is perhaps sinful and surely an attractor of attention by the Institute (that has always regarded the income the Societies generate as ultimately belonging to IEEE,) if not by the IRS. Thus, a ``Creative Spending Committee" was formed to develop constructive suggestions for spending our excessive surpluses. Nowadays, the committee for this purpose already exists and is called ... the IEEE! It was given until the next BoG meeting to develop its recommendations. We'll see what it came up with in the next column.
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