Disintermediate or die? Volunteer societies in an information age

Written for SIdelights: July 2007

I recently wrote an article for the ANZSI Newsletter suggesting that the ANZSI Council had outlived its usefulness. (You can read it below.) Re-reading the article afterwards, it occurred to me that I had been a little unfair. What’s happening to ANZSI is happening in just the same way to volunteer organisations of all kinds, all over the world, and no-one can really be blamed for failing to predict it, or finding it hard to cope with while it happens. Whether it can be coped with, and how, is something I explore a little later. But first a diagnosis – or perhaps a coronial enquiry, since what we are looking at here is the scene of an accident. Like many other volunteer societies, ANZSI has recently run head-on into something much bigger and faster than it is.

ANZSI – or AusSI, as it was then – was founded in the 1970s as a two-level structure, and that structure has remained in place. The four Branches – New South Wales, ACT, Victoria, and the newly formed New Zealand Branch – each have their own management committees, and the President of each Branch is a member of the Council – formerly the National Committee – along with a Council executive consisting of President, Vice-President, Treasurer and Secretary. The Branch Committees organise dinners, line up training days, run Conferences, and carry out other activities that involve direct access to members. The Council collects membership fees and distributes some of the money to the Branches. The rest is intended to be spent on large-sale projects and long-term plans, as well as ongoing national services like the ANZSI Newsletter, the website, the registration scheme and Indexers Available.

I joined AusSI in the early 1990s and became involved with its new website around 1998. During the 1980s I had spent a couple of years in the Public Service analysing departmental statistics for human resource planning, so perhaps I developed a nose for unsustainable demographics: at any rate, it wasn’t too long before I began to feel that there was something going wrong. Over the next few years I was able to identify several symptoms of a society heading for deep trouble. Here they are:

• Massive turnover of new members. ANZSI is astoundingly good at attracting new members, and appallingly bad at keeping them. Eighty to ninety percent of new members leave within three years, while a dwindling rump of veteran members gradually declines through natural attrition. By now over 50% of ANZSI consists of members who joined in or after 2003. Very few of them show any interest in the administration of the Society or its services.
• A steady accumulation of funds. For many years now the ANZSI Council has been running a budget surplus – but unlike the Australian Government, this doesn’t go to pay off debt, but builds up in bank accounts and low-interest term deposits. The ANZSI Council no longer has the confidence or the initiative to spend its own money on members’ benefits.
• Increasing difficulty in finding unpaid workers. Having been accustomed to delegate work to others, the Council finds itself with fewer and fewer people to delegate to. Those that it can employ are usually busy people with other priorities, so that simple jobs can stretch out to take months or even years.
• An increasing focus on self-aggrandization; having found itself unable or unwilling to carry out initiatives for ordinary members, the Council now spends much of its time on setting up rules and regulations for itself. Its latest project, for instance, is incorporation, which is guaranteed to take ages and achieve nothing but slowing its progress down from a crawl to a dead stop.
• A high level of technophobia among Council members. I was surprised at this at first, but I probably shouldn’t have been. Volunteer councillors are likely to be people who value face-to-face meetings, rigid rules and formal channels of communication: the technology which threatens to make all this obsolete is unlikely to be high on their list of priorities.

These look at first like separate problems – if, indeed, they look like problems at all: I have occasionally taken these up with some Council personnel and found that they seem to regard them as Acts of God, and just as irremediable – but a little digging reveals that they all stem from the same basic source. ANZSI and its Council have run afoul of modern technology in its most potent form: the Internet.

Consider how things were in the 1970s, when AusSI was formed. Letters were expensive and slow. Documents were typed. Copying was done on paper for ten cents a sheet or more. There were no fax machines, no email, no web. Communication was slow, expensive and difficult. An indexer working outside a major city was unlikely to meet – or even know of – anyone else in the same profession. An organisation to put indexers in touch with each other was a valuable resource. The ANZSI Newsletter from this period is a busy journal, full of interest: questions, discussions, comments and responses. Indexers Available, published then in book form, was the only way most indexers could put their name before a range of potential clients.

But that was then: this is now. The meteoric and unforeseen arrival of the Internet has suddenly altered the whole landscape. All the discussion that formerly enlivened the Newsletter has moved to global mailing lists like INDEX-L, and the Newsletter itself has become a dull collection of official pronouncements. Indexers Available still gets some use from new members, but most of them are now communicating directly with clients via email or their websites. For the same reason, registration is a dead issue: only four current ANZSI members have registered since 2002. New indexers are cutting out the middleman: or to use a modern buzzword, disintermediating.

The results of this are twofold. Indexers who want to connect up with other indexers find that they can now do it easily and quickly through the Internet without getting involved in the complicated rituals required by the Council; and the Council finds itself embarrassingly short of projects which could add any real value to indexers’ working lives. The Branches are thriving – for the moment – because there is still a need to arrange for face-to-face meetings of various kinds; but the Council is approaching the point where its only reason for existence is to entrench its own bureaucracy.

And the problem is not going to get better. Technology gets more accessible all the time. Ten years ago it would have taken an expert a month to set up a website for a complex community. Five years ago it would have taken a professional a week. Today anyone with basic Web skills can do it in a couple of hours. The new ANZSI website, designed in 2003, will be obsolete before it comes into use. Why submit to the constraints of ANZSI’s site, new members will ask, when you can set up your own? Why join a national society when you can talk to the world?

Unless there is substantial reform the ANZSI Council will eventually collapse, and possibly take the society with it. Is there anything that ANZSI and other societies could do to avert this, and embrace the Internet rather than fighting it? Here are a few suggestions:

• Remember that your society’s future depends on keeping your new members. They must have joined for a reason; try and find out what it is, and cater to it.
• Set up a society mailing list and use it for official communications as well as informal discussions of directions and policy. For most of your members this will be the society. Use it to arrange email meetings and votes in which all members can participate.
• If something needs doing, and you have the money, pay someone to do it. That’s what money’s for.
• Make web development a communal activity that all interested members can contribute to online.
• Make it easier to spend money than to accumulate it, by adopting electronic funds transfer, credit cards, PayPal, and discretionary expense accounts for society officials.
• Lower membership fees to realistically reflect the costs of administration in an electronic age.

Keep these in mind and you just may be able to turn that head-on collision into a sideswipe.