(And selling the water bottles was literally a last-minute seat-of-the-pants decision. I ended up helping out because I was already there representing the RARG and everyone involved knew and trusted me to some degree. If you had stood still long enough you might have gotten roped in, too. :) )

Hopefully, they’ll be thinking seriously about the membership and what it means, along with other ways of raising funds (selling those water bottles was a good start, but obviously not enough).

Although I understand the need for additional funding I’m still not at all sure why it has to be in the form of a “membership.” I agree that it would have been helpful if it had been more carefully defined and described prior to opening the floor to an unstructured discussion with such a large group.

I also agree that the de facto focus of the conference is student support and supervision with a relatively strong focus on network management. And I think that is a very needed, welcome, and viable niche. But I don’t think that those foci are clear to those who – unlike you and I – have not attended the conference several times, hung out on the listserv, and otherwise been engaged and involved with the community for a lengthy period of time. If that is what we do well and what we want to continue doing then let’s make it official and explicit so we can more effectively attract new members who share our interests but haven’t lucked into this group.

As for the organization as a whole, it’s really the only one that focuses only on student support and supervision (especially the supervision part). I don’t get a chance to go to many other conferences other than single day programs. I have been to many NERCOMP single day sessions on various topics, but they don’t always cover the exact issues that I, and many others in my position, face on a day-to-day basis. The beauty of ResNet is that it is about those people. I spoke with many newcomers this year who all really seemed to enjoy the conference and got quite a bit out of it. I also don’t think the low attendance is necessarily a bad thing. While I’m sure they would like to see it back at the 300 attendees level, the smaller conferences make it easier to meet more people without feeling overwhelmed. The biggest problem with the smaller size is the programs. It can tend to get tough to get presenters when there are only 140 people attending (I know, being on the program committee this year). But I have to say that of the past few ResNets, the presentations I attended this year were the best.

So maybe the organization should change its name and/or mission statement, but I disagree that it’s falling into irrelevance.