Interactions with Other Professional Organizations



Interactions with Other Professional Organizations Survey Results

Purpose

To describe the results of our recent survey regarding potential interactions with other professional organizations and options for those interactions.

Executive Summary

• The top three organizations are INFORMS, NDIA, and ITEA.

• The top four interactions are Joint Meetings, Membership Discounts, Registration Discounts, and Publications Discounts.

The selection of top “N” is a function of how the results grouped themselves into closely scored items. Details follow.

Background

There is a large number of professional organizations, both in the US and abroad. Some of those organizations have interests in common with MORS. Others have subgroups that have interests in common with MORS. Our intent is to capture and list the other professional organizations that MORS is likely to have common interests within which we can mutually interact, and to recommend a list of potential interactions that may beneficial to both organizations.

Approach

We prepared, received, and collated a survey around the June 2008 Board Meeting. This survey included the preliminary work by the Membership Committee that prepared a list of professional societies that may be of interest to MORS in terms of potential interactions. The results of the most recent survey are described herein. We received 31 responses, which is not only a high percentage of Board members (70% of 44, and a higher percentage of those present), but also enough to provide a “normal” distribution of results (which requires a minimum of 26 votes).

Considerations

Note that many of these professional organizations have international members. While this is not likely to be a problem for MORS members interacting with their organization, it provides further incentive to investigate how to get international members participating in the annual Symposium.

Prioritized List of Organizations

Tables 1 and 2 shows the prioritized list of professional organizations with which MORS might want to interact. Table 1 is ranked based on the total number of votes, while Table 2 is ranked by a weighted score (where a first choice was 5 points, second choice was 4 points, etc.). Note that INFORMS is by far the leading organization, followed closely by NDIA and ITEA. Appendix A provides a list of the full name of every organization and their URL.

Table 1: Ranked by Votes Table 2: Ranked by Score

[pic]

Not surprisingly, INFORMS is the highest ranked by at least a factor of two compared to any other organization, either in total number of votes or by weighted score.

The next two highest organizations are NDIA and ITEA which are in 2nd and 3rd position according to total votes and 3rd and 2nd position according to the score, respectively. In either case, their votes and scores are significantly higher than any other organizations. So our top three organizations for increasing professional interactions are INFORMS, followed by NDIA and ITEA.

The color coding groups the remaining organizations where each group contains the same members whether they are ranked by total votes or by score. So the next group of interest is CORS, ORSoc, IFORS, Cornwallis, SCEA, ASA, IEEE, and INCOSE. It is interesting to note that the majority of these organizations are international.

Current and Former Membership

We also polled the Board to determine which members had current or former membership with these other organizations. These are presented in Table 3.

Table 3: Current and Former Members of Each Organization

[pic]

The ranking is first by total (current and former) members, then by current members, then by former members. Once again, no surprise that INFORMS has the largest number of current and former members, while NDIA and ITEA have the 2nd and 3rd largest number of current and former members. (Note: ISMOR is an event rather than an organization, but two members marked it based on recent attendance.)

Potential Interactions

The Membership Committee identified 19 potential interactions divided for convenience into 6 broad categories. These potential interactions are listed in Appendix B with a short description for each.

The results of the voting also results in a ranking that differs slightly whether counting total votes versus weighted scores. The first four priority interactions according to both measures (votes and scores) are, in order of priority:

1. Joint Meetings

2. Membership Discounts

3. Registration Discounts

4. Publications Discounts

Table 4: Ranking Based on Total Votes Table 5: Ranking Based on Score

[pic]

These are closely followed by another group of four whose ranking varies by the two measures (total votes and score): Education Colloquia, Joint Leadership Meetings, Swapping Pubs and Swapping Links. There is much agreement in the ranking of the remaining options, with little difference between the total vote ranking and the score ranking.

Summary of Results

A summary of the findings are:

• The top three organizations are INFORMS, NDIA, and ITEA

• The top three organizations the Board is current or former members of are INFORMS, NDIA, and ITEA.

• The top four interactions we want to engage in are joint meeting, membership discounts, registration discounts, and publications discounts

Based on these results, we recommend increasing our interactions with INFORMS, NDIA and ITEA initially in the areas of joint meetings and mutual discounts.

Appendix A: The Other Professional Organizations Considered in This Survey

Table A.1: Alphabetical List of Organizations Considered in This Survey

[pic]

Appendix B: Potential Interactions with Other Professional Organizations

The following is a list of 19 potential interactions in six categories that we developed based on our brainstorming sessions.

Joint Face-to-face Meetings

• Joint Meetings (symposia, conferences, workshops). Different organizations have different processes and procedures for planning, sponsoring, executing, and evaluating their meetings. Joint meetings provide a way to not only share relevant technical information, but also provide a method of sharing techniques for event activities.

• Educational colloquia. We could piggy-back off of other educational colloquia, or co-sponsor an educational colloquium with another organization. For example, Mike McGinnis has invited MORS to have next year’s Educational Colloquium piggy-back off the annual Capstone simulation event held at VMASC in April each year. MORS could hold our colloquia at their facilities the days before or after the Capstone event, thereby facilitating joint participation by students and others who want to attend both.

• High School Outreach (shared activities or sharing the load). Some organizations have high school outreach. It would be useful to see which areas are currently covered geographically and by topic to see if we could “chare the load” of high school outreach with other organizations.

• Joint leadership meetings where organizational issues can be discussed. Most professional organizations appear to be losing members, and one cause of the shift may be that the younger generation is more at home interfacing on the Internet than at face-to-face meetings. Issues of how to address these demographic and other organizational matters may be of use to the leadership.

Shared Virtual Meetings

• Access to Webinars. Allow attendance at each other’s webinars. Webinars are much easier to put on as long as one is not overly concerned about security. They can be small and focused by topic as opposed to major undertakings. Leveraging each other’s webinars could be very useful to MORS.

• Shared Wiki or Blog access. Allows members from each organization to visit and contribute to each other’s wikis and blogs. (Note that AFCEA has recently launched their wikis.)

• Joint leadership wikis or blogs where organizational issues can be discussed. Similar to the above except that the information exchange is asynchronous.

Swapping Information

• Swapping published materials. MORS has a library of its publications, while other organizations may as well. A “swap” of publications may be useful.

• Swapping tutorials, either face-to-face live, online live, or online recorded. Many organizations have tutorials on technical subjects, as well as how their organization works. Some of these tutorials might be of interest to other organization members, as well as to MORS members. If available on the web, the swapping is even more readily facilitated.

• Shared wiki access. Shared access to each other’s wikis or selected sections of wikis (if and when applicable)

Swapping Ads

• Link Swapping. We currently provide links to some of the organizations listed in Table 1. We may need to add additional links for additional organizations, and need a way to confirm whether those other organizations link to us as well.

• Advertisement swapping. We could negotiate the swapping of advertisements of membership, events, and products in the publications of other professional organizations, at their meetings, and on their websites.

• Awards. Encourage each other’s members to apply for each other’s awards. For example, advertising the Barchi Prize may encourage more authors to come and present at a working group. Also consider appropriate joint awards.

Mutual Discounts

• Publication Discounts. Providing discounts for each other’s publications and subscriptions. Some organizations, such as the American Institute of Physics, ( ) provides discounts to members of a long list of other organizations associated with the physical sciences. Moreover, we recently found out that INFORMS members can get a better discount on the MOR Journal than can MORS members.

• Registration Discounts. Providing discounts to each other’s event registrations. As described above, organizations such as the American Institute of Physics accepts membership in many other organizations to receive a member discount at their events.

• Membership Discounts. Providing discounts to each other’s annual membership rates. If a member of one organization subscribes to another organization’s membership, they could get a discount.

• Product Discounts, such as on books, software, T-shirts, mugs, or other products.

Shared Benefits

• Job Placement. Access to each other’s job placement information (jobs and job seekers).

• Shared Benefits. Sharing selected benefits, such as insurance and health insurance (where we are added to another organizations totals and demographics for reduced rates).

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download