There are only 3 lifetime or honorary members and are really not even members. No voting rights or the other benefits of members.
The statistics for SLAS are squewed because some "members" are not
actually paying dues. The board used to pass out "free membership for life" but the practice was discontinued a few years back as "undemocratic". How many of these members are still active or even alive?. Also the internet has made membership in a local club rather redundant. If you're willing to forgo "face time" you can belong to any number of groups that have a strong focused interest in any or all aspects of astronomy. From CloudyNights to Yahoo discussion groups the list is endless. Why settle for Patrick Wiggins in person when you can talk to Brian Skiff or Sue French by email? Likewise the membership of this discussion list could contain a large number of dead email addresses. People just turn off their email delivery but remain on the rolls. Others abandon their email acount and move on to a new one. Others just set their spam filters to autodelete any mail from the list. The numbers game has it's problems DT
----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> To: Utah Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Cc: Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 12:46 PM Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] club growth
Thanks in large part to the efforts of SLAS Historian Ann Blanchard (who ever so politely kicked me in the rear to get the data organized) we have a pretty good record of SLAS's membership numbers.
Check out page 68 of the SLAS History document at: http://users.wirelessbeehive.com/~paw/slas/SLASPAST.PDF
That runs up through 01 January of this year (2011). Provided SLAS does not pick up any new members between now and midnight we'll start 2012 with 225.
Going back to the founding of SLAS we've had 1,795 members most of which, as Erik mentioned, were only members for 1 year.
patrick
On 31 Dec 2011, at 11:08, erikhansen@TheBlueZone.net wrote:
It seems SLAS has hovered around 200 + or - 10, for the last decade. It does seem like a dozen or so would join for one year only. The list of people who have ever joined SLAS is at least twice the current membership. I would think public star parties do more for attracting new members than school star parties. Perhaps OAS could hold public events at more places, assuming you only hold them at a few locations. SLAS holds them at about a dozen sites.
Personally, I think the anti-science voice is a loud minority.
Erik
Hi, Ron Vanderhule of OAS here. I am doing a survey of the local astro clubs in regards to their membership over the last ten years. Primarily in conjunction with their out reach efforts. OAS has been maintaining the same pace of public and school star parties ever since I joined the club 18 years ago. When I was first president in '99 and '00 we had peak membership of 63. We have since dwindled to about 35 or so. Initially I assumed it was a problem germaine to our club but an article in Astronomy last year, and a few other sources, seem to indicate the problem is with peoples attitude toward science nowdays. Actually our culture as a whole has changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years. Anyway, feel free to express your thoughts and theories in regards to this.
Ron Vanderhule
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