I just got back from several days in Denver attending the ASAE Annual Convention.

If you were to buy one session tape from the Convention, I would recommend ‘Formulas for Success in Working Relationships with Chief Elected Officials’. 5 former/current chief staff officers with a combined 175 years of experience talked about what they felt were the keys to a good and productive relationship with top volunteer leaders. Their advice and opinions form a philosophy of association management that is worth emulation even if you are not a senior staffer.

Click ‘More’ to see my summary of the comments in this session.
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The American Massage Therapy Association was unsuccessful in a lawsuit against a publisher who had copied the contents of the AMTA membership directory for their own commercial purposes. Courts have held for a quite a while that the contents of a telephone directory are not copyrightable and the judge held the same standard here.

I think this will drive more associations to switch to web-based membership directories and cease publication of print versions (not to mention the cost savings). It is just too easy to give a printed directory to a temp for a few days of data-entry. Voila! A new spam/direct mail list!

Web-based directories can be structured in a way that makes it much more difficult to copy member contact data in bulk yet still facilitate individual networking. This could help reduce the risk of member data being used by outside parties in unintended ways.

Here are a few methods to protect member data in a web-based membership directory:

• Put the directory in a restricted-access, members-only area of your web site.
• Limit the number of results shown at one time in a search results set.
• Only show partial contact info (such as name, city and state) in the search results list.
• Display full contact information one member at a time.
• Do not allow browsing of the complete alphabetical list of members.

This may not stop the truly determined but it will make it much more difficult to copy the entire membership list.

Depending upon implementation, some of these methods could limit the usefulness of the directory for members. You will have to balance that against the need to make that data available to members in a form that won’t easily be abused.

From the Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog:

US House of Representatives and XML

The US House of Representatives has made a significant effort in developing DTDs for describing bills. My authority as Utah CIO doesn’t extend to the Utah Legislature (you can tell from their URL), but I’d still love to see them adopt something like the House standards. They might be able to just use the House DTDs directly. A recent article in Government Computer News writes about the House XMl efforts.

This could be quite useful for tracking legislation for association government affairs programs. It will be very interesting to see how this is deployed. I’d love to be able to make an xml-rpc call to a government server to get the latest version of a particular bill in xml.

The ASHA web site was given 4 awards last night at the Society of National Association Publications Excel Awards program.

We received a silver for our members-only area and 3 bronzes for online house advertising, editorial content, and overall design excellence.

Congratulations and thank you to Amy, Glen, Margaret, Nancy and Tule!

From a WorldCom press release:

As a result of an internal audit of the company?s capital expenditure accounting, it was determined that certain transfers from line cost expenses to capital accounts during this period were not made in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The amount of these transfers was $3.055 billion for 2001 and $797 million for first quarter 2002.

That’s rather understated, isn’t it. This is going to be huge. Lots of associations use WorldCom and subsidiaries for web hosting and ISP services. Time to start migration planning.

Seems to be lots of interest in securing the rights to administer the .org top-level domain. (Story found via Hack the Planet.)

I thought this would have been a good thing for ASAE to bid on but it doesn’t appear they are among the groups competing.

This week I achieved something I’ve wanted to do for about 5 years: I earned my CAE designation from ASAE.

I put some of my study notes onto this site prior to the exam so I could do quick reviews of them during the day. They aren’t comprehensive but they might be helpful to you if you’re sitting for the exam during the next go around in November.