I cannot agree more strongly with this statement. Right now, that question is answered:
1) the ability to play in AGA tournaments. (manifested by a rating & a rank.)
1a) records & statistics of all the tournaments you've ever played in & ways to track your progress. (AGAGD)
2) advanced content in the e-journal.
3) a yearbook.
4) a membership card.
5) The warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting your favorite hobby & furthering the US's representation of it (scoff if you like )
6) The ability to join a chapter & make your voice heard to the AGA board.
I think this is more than enough to justify membership, but there may be other benefits that either went unmentioned or could be added. For example, in the BGA, membership includes things like discounts on books, discounts on tournament entry fees, travel subsidies, youth subsidies, and loans of boards and clocks for tournaments. There even used to be a lending library service of some sort - that may be an idea for the vast USA. There are also intangibles such as the ability to become an insider - a volunteer or an administrator (if you're hard nosed you don't have to think of it as giving up valuable time for nothing; you could treat it as a chance to beef up your cv).
However, debates about things like the AGA often revolve around perception rather than facts. Those in possession of facts often act smugly and unwisely in ignoring perceptions. The art of politics needs to be cultivated.
Speaking as an outsider, who may therefore see some things in a different light, I get the impression that to many the AGA is like a bus that doesn't know where it's going, doesn't always stop at the right places, and sometimes veers across the road. People are never quite sure who's driving the bus. This is perception.
Those bolstered by facts will argue that the bus is indeed running, and even if a little late does stop at many places, and there's room on the bus for more, etc, etc. Same bus, but seen in two completely different ways.
In the current thread, I think one item on the perception side should certainly not be countered by so-called facts. It has to be challenged by changing the point of view. This is the item brilliantly summed up as the danger that the AGA could become a KGS suburb. There is a perception that you can only serve or benefit from the AGA if you do online this or online that. The perception is bolstered by things like obsession with online ratings, e-journals, e-books, e-tournaments, e-volunteers, and no doubt e-restrooms. Of course "facts" - such as the huge size of the USA and the money savings offered by the internet - can be marshalled easily against this perception. But that is no answer. The answer is to highlight the human side, to change the perception. Which should not be that hard when you consider that several hundred humans just travelled across the supposedly vast USA to go to a congress that has been hailed as a great success (thanks to humans).
The tools to highlight this different perception exist, but are not being used as far as I can see. The AGJ-e seems (to me as an outsider but also as a journalist) to have lost its way badly, trying, for example, to match Go World with pro-game commentaries rather than talking much more about AGA members. I may have missed some things, and I apolgise if I have, but I saw an apparently large editorial team producing many commentaries but I saw nothing in the journal about the many characters who must have made it to the congress, interviews about why they came, what they do back home, etc. Surely commentaries can be done on a demo board or after the event. You can't do interviews on a demo board, or by phone as well as you can face to face.
I also think administrators lost a trick by not commenting publicly on the Congress. They may feel that penning a few words for the AGJ is yet another chore in a busy schedule, but a stitch in time saves nine, and they would probably have to answer fewer whingeing e-mails if they would only communicate more (this applies to go associations in general, in my experience; it also applies in real offices!). In this communication, there should, quite simply, be less (if L19 is anything like representative) mention of databases, iPads, computer-calculated ratings and the like and more mention of humans (of course all the electronic wizardry can be used in the background, but as tools, not as part of the cargo cult we are seeing at present).
I think this (revamping the journalistic focus of the AGJ and getting administrators to communicate more, and even piddly ideas like a loan library) answers vash3g's slightly antagonistic questions (What will You do to help the organization? What ideas can you bring forth?), but I repeat that these are not really the right questions to ask anyway. A more fruitful question is something like: how can you get people to
perceive the AGA as being interested in its members as humans?
Would you like to do it? Won't take long...
