Presentation to the IBD 2025

Next year is Mensa's 80th anniversary — our "Oak Jubilee." Over eight decades, we have built a global membership organization that nurtures, supports, and celebrates intelligence. In an increasingly anti-intellectual world, we have created an environment where gifted people of all ages and nationalities can feel safe to "unfold" and be their true selves.

We've come a long way since two Brits met on a train, but despite the best efforts of hundreds of volunteers and staff, past and present, Mensa International faces several significant challenges in our quest to be the world’s foremost society for intellectually gifted people.

 

The sad truth is that the majority of our members probably don’t even realize Mensa International exists. Mensa International is a loosely connected federation of national groups; most members know little about activities in other countries, rarely meet or interact with international members, receive very little international news, are oblivious to international volunteering opportunities, and often remain unaware of or unable to access tools such as the international website or Hub. 

 

Many of our challenges boil down to resources: money and volunteer time.

 

Because resources have always been tight, International Mensa’s approach to technology and advances has been to repeatedly choose cheaper, quicker, easier options. We’ve cobbled together our infrastructure and policies one piece at a time, always focusing on the cost of the individual component being considered at the moment.

 

Today, we have a non-functioning CRM, two websites based on two different systems running on different hosts of different reliabilities, poor security, a lack of integration capabilities, a broken JCA, and missing or obsolete procedures. This fragmentation is no longer working for us. 

 

 

In the 1993 novel Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett, the character Captain Samuel Vimes muses about the Boots Theory of socio-economic unfairness:

 

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. 

... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

 

It’s time for a reboot.

 

And this time, we're going to allocate enough resources, mainly volunteer time and effort, to do it right. The IMD project is like planting an oak tree for the benefit of future Mensa generations, and like an oak tree, it will be strong and long-lasting.