In response to Adrien’s post about expanding Oregon Direct Action over the summer, I have a few thoughts. First, in my experience working with other student organizations, more members is not necessarily better. More members mean that you can potentially get more accomplished, you have access to greater pools of knowledge, you can specialize more, etc. However, more members also means more inertia. It’s harder to organize a group toward one specific end. You have to change the formats of your discussion; conference calls stop being feasible and you have to have group meetings. People stop feeling as responsible to do something as diffusion of responsibility sets in.
As I look at it, I feel that whether the costs outweigh the benefits of a new member depends upon the current status of the organization and the nature of the new member. I feel that, above a certain point, any organization, no matter how solid its members are, attains too much inertia to be effective, unless the organization is effectively subdivided. That’s one consideration. Another is to consider what specialties the organization needs and which the organization already has plenty of. Obviously if you have 4 tech people and no PR people, then a PR person would help the organization more than a tech person. You also need to consider personalities: if you have two leader type people of one specialty, then you’re going to have decision making conflicts, unless you designate a leader, and if you do designate a leader, you might hurt the pride of one of the leader-types. Similarly, you don’t want to have 4 tech types, none of whom like to lead. Okay, so that’s the organization side of the equation.
On the new-member side of the equation, you want a member who fits well with the needs of the organization, as I just said, but you also want a member who has a proper attitude and motivations. Is the member there because it seems interesting? wants to pad a resume? wants to really achieve a certain goal? wants to really create a solid, sustainable organization? And of course there are many more motivations, all in various combinations, and these need to match the organizations desires–though some are obviously good, such as the desire to contribute, and others are definitely questionable, like the desire to pad a resume. So say the person wants to “do good” and “make a sustainable organization,” but what, specifically, do they mean by this? Do they want to do good by creating a fund raising organization? an information disseminating organization? an organization that sends groups to foreign countries to do aid work? If so, where? and what kind of aid work? Are the picky about these things or are they willing to go with it? Then there’s personality and attitude. Is the person willing to compromise? dependable? passive-aggressive? cliquey?
There’s a lot to consider, and, I believe, there’s a lot riding on that consideration. I’ve worked with a few student organizations, and I’ve seen quite a few more, and I feel like a lot of them don’t accomplish much, at least relative to those that really have their stuff together. I went to a conference for the group Face AIDS, a fund raising organization, and at that conference were around 25 chapters of this group. 2 of them brought in more than 90% of the money, and the rest did very little. One group I talked to said that they got a lot done one year with a small group of 8 students who met every week, but when they got popular and the group increased in size to 20-30 the next year, they couldn’t really do much. So if you want to know what I’m basing this off of, that’s what it is. I believe that all of these groups wanted to raise a lot of money to fight AIDS, but very few of them did, because, among other reasons, they didn’t have a solid member base.
In my mind, the ideal organization to achieve “direct action” in another country would be one that tried to stay under 10 members, and tried to choose each member based on their ability to fill a need of the organization, their commitment to the organization, the extent to which their motivations and goals lined up with those of the organization, and how well their personality meshed with the other members of the organization. Of course, things such as the “needs,” the “goals,” and “personality” all need to be defined, and I hope we could do that some time.
Now, I don’t feel that an effective way to achieve this goal is to flier, especially at Intro-Duck-tion, because that gets us whichever members choose to respond to the flier, and we can’t choose either the total number of them or on how well they would contribute, because once they show up at a meeting, they’re basically members until they decide not to be. We can’t really kick them out (I guess we could, but generally groups don’t do this). Furthermore, we’d likely get a group of freshmen who simply aren’t at a stage in their lives yet to commit like we’d want to and be willing to go abroad like we want to.
I think a better way to get the people we want is to simply have current members of the organization think of which friends would work best and try to get them to join. We could talk as a group before we sent out an offer to a member to decide if they seem to be best. This lets us be much more selective, and we get members who know at least one other member, and so everyone is connected to every one else at least somehow, which I think would contribute to group cohesion (another important thing!).
So, whether you agree with what I’ve said or not, I hope that you will at least agree that we should have a discussion about how we want ODA, the organization, to be, in terms of members, and how we want to achieve this.