Pam recently returned from her annual ASAE convention, and shared some observations and lessons and pointers to blogs reviewing the convention. I read this one at Social Fish :
Most of it was pretty specific to ASAE, however, this jumped out at me:
"Here’s a lesson: there is no such thing anymore as “unofficial” versus “official”member activity. We’re all part of the same community. We’re all building community and engagement on behalf of ASAE – for you, not for us. The point of YAP is to get young association professionals (including “young to the profession” and “young at heart”) more involved in ASAE. Get it? We’re doing it for the love. All we’d like in return is a little love back once in a while. We’re feeling our love is unrequited, and if you’re not careful, one day we’ll take mom’s advice and go find other fish in the sea."
We in Mensa do try so hard to distinguish between official and unofficial, between ASIE-regulated and Fist-waving independence. Mensa has very much become a huge set of overlapping groupings of members, some of which are initiated top-down, and some of which are grown grass-up. But all are equally essential to gestalt of the Mensa experience.
Reading the comments, the recurring theme was that ASAE leaders were out of touch with their membership. I see this same complaint about AMC on some of the Yahoo lists. I really don't feel like I'm out of touch. So either I'm not and other AMCers are, or I am and I am not seeing that in myself because I don't understand what members mean by "out of touch."
So, readers.... are Mensa's national leaders "out of touch" with the membership, and if so, what do you mean by that? What actions or inactions make you reach that conclusion?
Hhmmm.... and since there are so many members and so many member communities, are there particular segments of the membership that leaders should be touching more than others? (Get your minds out of the gutter!)
1 comment:
I believe *some* of the AMC are out of touch. There have been a couple of AMC members who have flat-out told me that they only enjoy their insular AMC existence: they only want to hang out with other AMC members and talk AMC or AML politics. I think those AMC members may be seriously out of touch with the membership.
However, how can *new* members of the AMC be so out of touch? Bevard, Conti, Mark, Rieger, Dahl, etc...we have only been on the AMC *one* year, for goodness sakes. Some of us, me included, make it a habit to *avoid* exclusively socializing with other AMC members at AGs and RGs. No way we are out of touch, at least with the membership as we experienced it before we became members of the AMC.
The "opposition" in the Yahoo groups, etc., have been opposition for as long as I have known them, regardless of who is holding office at the time. They accuse the AMC of groupthink but do not recognize the classic symptoms in themselves. Ironically, it is they who I think is out of touch.
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