Although many of our documents began as individual efforts to solve problems, maintenance of existing documents should involve a larger number of participants. CSI offers the opportunity to participate in such Institute-level work through its Corresponding Committee program. All members are eligible to participate in corresponding committees; all that is necessary to be considered is to submit a form giving information about your experience and interests.
Despite the existence of this opportunity, relatively few of CSI's members have taken part in review or revision of existing documents. We could certainly make better use of corresponding members, and region chairs are in an excellent position to encourage participation. Region chairs should:
Explain to chapter chairs how the corresponding committee program works, and ask them to pass this information on to their chapter members.
Encourage chapter chairs to actively seek out qualified individuals who might be interested in becoming corresponding members.
Develop region and chapter focus groups for technical topics.
While we're trying to get members to contribute, we must remember that ours is a non-profit organization, and we generally don't pay people for their work. This makes public recognition of effort extremely important - not only to acknowledge those who have contributed, but to encourage participation by others. Region and chapter chairs should seek out and recognize individual, chapter, and region technical excellence.
One of the most interesting ideas we discussed is the formation of a Council of Region Technical Chairs. This group would ensure that useful ideas, documents, and technology developed by individuals or chapters would be shared throughout the organization. By accumulating information about the abilities and interests of members, it would also recommend candidates for region and Institute task teams and committees.
The council of RTC's could serve as the head of a structured virtual committee, including potentially all members, to offer assistance to TechCom when needed. Many TechCom tasks require quick action, and cannot wait for the time it would take to pass the issue on to regions and chapters and wait for a response. Other jobs would benefit from additional input, and many of those would be easier if there were a formal method for soliciting, evaluating, and accumulating responses. The council of RTC's could facilitate such efforts, making use of the personal relationships between RTC's and the chapter technical chairs.
There has been much debate about the value of regions. Why should we keep them, when Institute committees can now communicate directly with all chapter chairs - or even all members? The potential for close personal relationships between Institute committees and region chairs, between region chairs and chapter chairs, and between chapter chairs and members, may be the most important benefit of our Institute-region-chapter structure. Sure, I am now able to e-mail a request to every one of our members, but you can guess what the response would be. The same request, coming from a friend in the same chapter or region, would be far more likely to get a response.
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