Thoughts on Membership, Language, Inclusion

excerpts from an email exchange. Participants: Ed Letchinger, Melissa Severson, Michele Hunt

Please send us your thoughts!!!

In a message dated 3/21/2008 11:00:56 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, ed@boulwareinc.com writes:

Melissa, You've once again done a very fine job on the two mailings. Really wonderful work, great layout, great content. Thank you!!

One little note: I think we should be careful to the point of avoidance when referring to "members", as in : "As we work to spread out information among our members, we encourage you to send us your thoughts and ideas in response to our output. Your unique perspective will bring added value to our collective progression. We hope to hear from everyone!"

The reason I say this is that we are not at this point actually a membership organization. We have no official system for people to become members, no dues, no membership fee, no special benefits for members. In fact, having members might be exclusionary, because you automatically have "non-members" once you have "members".!! Perhaps we should be exploring this possibility for 2008, however.

warmly,

ed

From: Michele Hunt
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 11:28 AM
Subject: Re: Membership in the IFI

Thanks Melissa,

I think it is a wonderful idea! I strongly agree with one note;language is powerful and carries with it inherent assumptions. Membership, for me, carries with it "insiders and outsiders". Our current model unintentionally has some of the inner circle - outer circle feel (Co-founders and staff verses other attendees) I realize this was necessary in the beginning.

Maybe we could come up with another model or language that gets to the heart of Melissa's idea. Where we make a contribution to grow and development of the Big idea and by doing so we create a sense of identity and ownership for the Big Idea. I believe people need to have an identity with this movement, and be able to proudly declare I am a part of the Institute For Inclusion.

I hope we continue the dialogue, this is important. Can we float this as a Blog dialogue to everyone who attended the conference? I bet innovative solutions will develop. Great subject to use this medium.

Michele Hunt

In a message dated 3/21/2008 1:41:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, seversonm@instituteforinclusion.org writes:

These are very good points, thanks to both of you for your input!

It’s true that membership creates boundaries – the idea is that everyone is a member of the Inclusion Effort one way or another, however; some are active participants and some are not. I’ll avoid the word member from now on (I was getting into that habit – I only thought of it as a means of making people feel welcome, I didn’t think of the converse implications).

We can take the safe route and refer to everyone as people (this is the standard now anyway, right?) I just tend to think that language sounds cold. That’s probably just me though.

There’s one other thing I wanted to mention (now that we’re on the topic)…

Communities tend to create their own labels based on what’s practical for them, and then the labels have a way of growing beyond their practicality into more restricting realms. We are already doing this in one respect relating to IFI – we sometimes separate attendees from invitees.

We mean nothing by it at this time, however as we grow into online networking, we’ll be able to move away from the “invitee” and “attendee” separation, because it implies that attendees of the conference have a higher participatory status than non-attendees. Right now, that’s almost entirely accurate, but only because we have not set up the tools to make the Big Idea a year-round conversation yet. We now have the resources and energy to do so, so now is the perfect time to discuss the implications of how we refer to participatory status. (Again, I am so glad Ed pointed this out, thanks for catching my language!)

People need to know that the ideas and progress made using web tools is equally important and has equal status to the ideas discussed at the conference. Many people regret being unable to attend, and I’m sure they have a lot to provide to our thinking. We just need to give them the tools to communicate remotely, and encourage them to do so in their free time.

Therefore, I do feel there should be some form of recognition/label that gets more to the heart of what we all really mean when we say “attendee” and “invitee”. I think we really mean “active participant” vs. “reader”. (Readers may not respond to our mailings, but they also do not ask to be removed from the list – therefore it’s safe to assume they are following our progress and will become active when they have the time/resources/online networking tools to do so.) I’ve heard active participant in use as well in internal conversations – so it’s already there, really.

Again, it would probably be better to avoid labels completely and just call everyone “people” like I said at the top of this email. J But, if the label-situation ever came up again and/or we find it necessary to assign labels, then “active participant” “sponsor” “reader” etc would probably be an acceptable form of recognition without offending anyone. What do you think?

The blog would be a great place to continue this conversation! Or Russ’ new forum once it goes public (I am not sure if you have seen it yet, but I like it and I hope it will go public sooner than later!)

Melissa Severson, Coordinator

The Institute for Inclusion

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From: Michele Hunt
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: Membership in the IFI

maybe we create a new word or phrase as we continue our journey to learn and grow the power of inclusion. We are all unlearning things, as the "Kings" language is rooted in the culture from which it came.

Michele