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Long before the next 10 years have passed, our Special Interest Groups (SIGs) will have become the single most important aspect of Mensa membership. People will join Mensa for a plethora of different reasons, but they'll stay in Mensa because of our SIGs.
It's in all our interests for us to help make this happen sooner rather than later. This change will be fundamental, but it will be a win/win situation both for our individual members and for us as a society. The force compelling this change will be the World Wide Web.
The Web is unstructured by both design and intent. It grows and changes as it is affected by millions of users globally. Generally, efforts to plan and direct this growth haven't worked; the phenomenal growth of the Web has developed despite plans, not because of them. For Mensa to meet the changes brought by the Web, Mensa, too, may have to change.
As an organization, we've usually looked at SIGs fairly casually. If some people were interested in a particular subject, great, they could get together and form a local or national SIG. If they weren't interested in a subject area, no one would be particularly concerned. We named SIGs officers to give some general coordination to the process, to make sure groups had a coordinator, to ensure they didn't use the word "Mensa" in their name. Very few SIGs officers tried actively to develop SIGs, and those who did were sometimes encouraged to relax, to let things flow.
A high proportion of SIGs—in Great Britain, in the U.S., in Canada, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Australia and elsewhere—has been social in nature. There were gourmet dining SIGs and casual dining SIGs, SIGs for going to the movies and for going to the theatre, SIGs for getting together on "Friendly Fridays." When personal conflicts broke out within a SIG, Mensa leaders would try to resolve matters, but as long as there weren't any conflicts, things just happened without plan.
We had far fewer people who belonged to professional and hobby SIGs. Photography SIGs would start, meet, last awhile and dissipate. A few years later, they'd start again. There have been a few SIGs for people in specific professions. Sometimes they'd attract a few members, sometimes less than a few. The groups lasted as long as a coordinator was motivated. Sometimes a coordinator had a successor, sometimes not.
With the advent of the Web, the need for physical meetings has diminished for many types of SIGs. On the local level, there will always be a strong interest in SIGs where people get together for one reason or another. In some cases, these are SIGs for families and children; my daughter, now 13, enjoyed her visit with a Mensa group five or so years ago to the New York City Mounted Police unit. Somewhere there's even a photo of her sitting on a police horse, surrounded by a bunch of Mensans.
In most cases, the local social SIGs will survive and thrive. There will always be a need for them. Nevertheless, the growth in Mensa will occur in e-SIGs and e-lists. It's already happening, and it will grow exponentially over the next few years.
The growth, however, will not be in general discussion areas but in specific, narrow-band areas. Hundreds of different e-groups based on specific, narrow-gauge areas of mutual interest will develop. Because the list members will be Mensans who share a particular concern, the list or e-group will be kept going for a long, long time, as opposed to an e-mail list or chat area on which 100 Mensans may drop in but do not necessarily share a commonality of interest.
E-groups have other advantages. There's no need to produce a paper newsletter, and that eliminates dunning people for payments so the printer's bill and postage can be paid. The newsletter will be published on the Web. The need for a newsletter might even be eliminated by the fact that the group corresponds daily.
There are no costs. And recruitment will be worldwide.
The main requirement is, as it has always been, for a coordinator to keep things going on an even keel. On the Web, this person is the list moderator, sometimes known as the list "owner."
A list might be for fans of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Or for Mensans interested in Medieval Latin. It might be for Star Trek or for Sherlock Holmes or for Shakespeare. Or, for that matter, for Sir Francis Bacon and discussions about whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
A list might be for Mensa architects or Mensa soccer players. It might be for retired Air Force fighter pilots or for bankers and CPAs. The main requirements are a specific, narrowly focused area of inquisitiveness so that list members will actually have an interest in the matters being discussed, along with a respect for basic civility. With 15 or so people, lists become workable. With 25 people, they develop a life of their own.
Lists must be kept on topic. And postings must be reasonable in quantity. People can accept two or three messages a day; they really don't want to get 12 messages a day from the same people, again and again.
Eventually arguments will break out among the list members. It happens worldwide, dozens of times a day. On the Web, that's not really a problem. A few members go off and set up their own list, with slight differences from the original. And both lists can continue to work.
Right now, there are discussions about putting Mensa e-lists on one server. This is an interesting option, and it's a great idea to make a software system for e-lists available on a Mensa server. On the other hand, if it's imposed as a rule, it will never work. Anyone can set up an e-list at dozens of different places. Right now, it's still free. Soon there will be some charges. But it will still be simple. Offering an option from Mensa servers is great; requiring that Mensa lists be on our own servers is not a viable idea.
We worry a lot about using the Mensa name in SIG groups. It's not allowed. The reasons for this no longer matter. What difference does it make if there's an M-Architects e-list or a Mensa Architects list? Either way, the list and group can't and shouldn't take an official position on any public issue. They shouldn't run around issuing their own press releases. But restricting their use of the Mensa name is no longer a viable option.
For groups that are officially a part of a local Mensa organization, those rules are enforceable, but if someone, somewhere, sets up a Mensa Gourmet Chefs list, there's not very much we can do about it. It's an e-list, not a group. It should have some official association with Mensa, but if it doesn't, how can it be stopped? And should we bother?
We should encourage e-lists and e-groups to register with some Mensa structure, somewhere. Perhaps with their national Mensas; that seems to work. The SIGs will, of course, have a multinational membership, limited only by language.
If planned, these lists could make Mensa considerably more important to some people than it might now be. We don't really know why our membership retention rates aren't higher, but we do know that we've done many things about social activities, many things about "more exciting speakers," and these work for only a short time. The Web has happened; we have to make it work for us.
Mensa needs to develop worldwide e-groups, to plan groups that might have appeal, to get those groups organized, to see which ones work and which ones don't. The SIGs' development process is fundamental to our future. It can't be treated casually.
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Copyright
© 2002 Fredric M. Carlin