Posted by Ben Martin under
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Has anyone else grown weary of the discussions on ASAE’s four bazillion listserves? After about ten consecutive years as a subscriber to one or more of ASAE’s listserves, to say the content has gotten tired and predictable would be an epic understatement. You know the drill on these lists:
- “Can anyone recommend a good restaurant for a board retreat in Omaha?”
- “Help, I need a new membership card vendor!”
- “Any strategic planning consultants you’d suggest?”
- “What’s the average retention rate for the association industry?”
- “I have this sticky staffing situation…”
- “[profound social media topic du jour]”
- “[I’m a vendor replying to your message with a painfully obvious attempt to sell you and everyone else listening. And softly of course.]”
- …and everyone’s favorite: “A Friday question…”
Ugh. It’s sad. These listserves are supposed to be like the members-only lounges of ASAE; the conversation cafes where you can talk shop in a highly relevant context. Frankly, I’ve found more relevance amongst those in the blogocluster (hat tip to JDC for that one) than on the ASAE listserves. The signal to noise ratio on ASAE’s listserves has diminished to the point where my investment of time is generating a diminishing return.
Therefore, a few weeks ago I tried to hack my ASAE listserve subscriptions into something less, shall we say, tedious. It was a good effort, but as is often the case, it turns out my hack was a complete and utter fail. Along the way, though, a strange thing happened. I barely noticed they were gone. I hardly miss those lists!
Always endeavoring to be a constructive critic, here are some of my ideas to improve the listserve experience:
- Upgrade the software. Lyris for DOS, while lightweight, is NOT feature rich. Upgrade the software. All kidding aside, the software must be a good five years old. Upgrade the software.
- Split the big lists into smaller groups. Not sure what that ideal number should be, but there’s a reason that the early internet chat rooms filled up and spilled over into other rooms.
- Find a way to kill the out of office replies before they reach my digest. Probably achievable with an upgrade.
- Offer an RSS feed for each list. A secure one, if it must be so to protect the value of membership.
- Enforce the listserve rules. In particular…
- Banish from the list anyone who replies to the digest and leaves the full contents of the digest in the body of the reply for a week or maybe a month.
So, as I try to repair my hack, I’ll be dark on ASAE’s listserves. But please, drop me a tweet to let me know what that great restaurant in Omaha is called.
Tagged: Association Management; Associations; CAE; Certified Association Executive
Posted by AEM under
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A colleague was recently invited to breakfast by two other attendees at a business conference. After a couple of minutes of small talk, the other two whipped out their Blackberries and spent the rest of the time reading and sending email. They did not talk to her or to each other. Her time was wasted.
Those folks may have bragged about how they were multi-tasking - eating, networking, and conducting business at the same time. However, they weren’t networking - they were ignoring the person they invited to join them.
Multi-tasking is not new or innovative (think of watching TV during dinner). It’s been going on for a long time, usually with middling results. Some people may be able to give superficial attention to a variety of tasks at once. Concentrating on one, though, distracts them from the others.
Multi-tasking also is not a valid excuse for rudeness. If you are not going to talk to the person you invited to join you, if you are not going to participate in the meeting you are attending, if you do not want to pay attention to the speaker you paid to hear, then go somewhere else to do whatever it is you think is more important.
It may feel empowering to be in constant communication with everybody, but it isn’t necessary. Eat your breakfast and talk to the person sitting next to you (that’s multi-tasking, too). You can check your email later.
Posted by Sue Pelletier under
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Michael Hart posts some interesting audience response system results from the opening session at TS2 earlier this week. He says:
Some 34 percent of the audience said they had already seen the rising cost of airline tickets and the elimination of flights have an impact on their exhibiting programs. Another 43 percent said they were still […]
Posted by Sue Pelletier under
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Just ran across this on Mental Floss and thought it was interesting: How old is your brain? The screen flashes some numbers, then blank circles in the same position the numbers were in, and you have to click on the circles that correlate to the numbers, from lowest to highest.
On my first shot, my brain […]
Posted by jtcobb under
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And is liberal democracy disappearing in the process? As Mark Pesce sees it, yes on both counts. “Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to generation,” says Pesce in a recent presentation for the Personal Democracy Forum,
then, still slowly, from location to location, now ‘hyperdistribute’ themselves via the Human Network. We all learn from each other […]
Posted by Maddie Grant under
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Dang, I guess I won’t be able to finish my current game with Jeff then. Good, ’cause I was losing. And I don’t like losing. In fact - something you won’t know about me - I am competitive and a bad loser. I get all pissed off and stomp out of the room.
So maybe this is a good thing…. NOT. They didn’t think getting people to play Scrabble online was good for their brand? So what if it was an “unofficial” version of the game? How do they know that of the half a million people playing Scrabulous on Facebook, that a bunch of those people went home and thought to themselves, this could be fun for the whole family, I’m going to dig out my old Scrabble box. And oh look, most of my letters are missing and my board is torn, I’m going to buy myself a new one!
I said on Twitter that I hate using this phrase, but…
Hasbro = FAIL.
Posted by Mickie Rops under
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You hear often the mantra that a certifying body within a parent association has to be set up and governed in ways to prevent undue influence and conflicts of interest, but rarely do you hear realistic examples of potential issues. Here are several: A professional association is primarily interested in advancing a profession and meeting member needs. When members complain that they are frustrated with the “hoops they are required to jump through” or angered…
Posted by Sue Pelletier under
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A couple of items in this morning’s Boston Globe caught my eye: First is this article about what happens to the loose change that people don’t remember to pick up on the other side of security. It goes to pay for screeners and equipment. From the article:
The TSA has been allowed to pocket the change […]