Reply To: How will you ensure transparency and enable member participation at/in CIRA?

[Daniel]

My experience, aside from CIRA is with local NFP’s. In that case member lists are not (to my knowledge) available simply for the asking by a member. In fact, for one of the NFP’s I would hope they would fight tooth and nail such a request as a violation of privacy for the portion of the membership who are vulnerable persons who are receiving service from the organization.
I am not convinced giving out membership lists to any member who asks is a norm among NFP’s and I’d like to know what research and information you have on that question. It would also be instructive to look at other national not-for-profits to see what their membership engagement looks like, (or does not look like).

Having members being able to communicate with each other and find other like-minded members is a laudable goal, but I don’t think giving out membership lists is the way to achieve it.

Having the opportunity/invitation to communicate in a third-party forum would be of interest. If it looked to be properly moderated and not a flame-war or rumour-fest dungeon, I’d go for it.
What I don’t want is commercial spam, or someone emailing me with nonsense and/or baseless accusations and innuendo. For that matter I’d prefer not to have the option of doing that myself, as if I ever had a relapse (for example due to having to have some surgery which required me to stop taking my medication for mental illness for long period of time), there is the potential I could end up in a state where I believed it was imperative I inform the membership of what I truly believed was happening, when in fact it was the result of delusions I was experiencing due to mental illness. I’d rather not have that easy a means of ruining my own reputation, and angering a lot of people, not to mention impugning the reputation of CIRA in the process.

In short, there are good reasons NFPs, and other organizations are structured when it comes organization-wide communications, and I for one think that the balance is usually reasonable.

Would I welcome proper forums and virtual meet-and-greets for those of who do not live in large centres to be able to network with other members, and feel more than tangentially connected to CIRA? I sure would. That, for me, doesn’t include having my name and contact information given out willy-nilly for anyone (or even ‘only’ any member) who asks.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 1 week ago by  Daniel. Reason: Wrong word in sentence; NFP's instead of CIRA