Pat Reynolds wrote:

 since non-voting members often now get nothing from
>their committees, and since it is as easy for a committee to provide
>information to the entire ICOM membership as it is to provide it just to
>their non-voting membership, why do we have non-voting memberships any
>more?  Why not have just two or three voting memberships: national
>committee, subject committee and, where appropriate, regional committee?
>

I agree: the question of whether to send the newsletter of an international
committee solely to voting members and not to non-voting becomes irrelevant
when the difference in cost does not refer to the type of membership, but
rather to whether the members can be reached by e-mail or ordinary mail.

In ICME we feel it would be more relevant to consider charging those
members (voting or non-voting) we have to reach through ordinary mail (they
are the costly ones!), than distinguishing between voting and non-voting
members.

The real challenge for ICOM now is to make members who do have an e-mail
address to report it to the ICOM Secretariat, AND make the ICOM Secretariat
start using the advantages of electronic mail more fully.

In ICME we have been running a reasonably successfull campaign trying to
get our members e-mail addresses, and we have dramatically cut the costs
for mailing the newsletter. Still, we discover all the time that there are
many more members with e-mail addresses, so the potential for cutting costs
is even higher.

Regarding the point of distingusihing between voting and non voting
members: Perhaps there is reason to believe that the ICOM Reform Task Force
will forward a proposal where all ICOM members are voting members in two
international committees?

Per B. Rekdal
Cheiperson ICME


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