I hope this is a wake-up call to SCIP to reduce its expenses and to offer more virtual services at a reasonable cost. Like Arik I wonder if the model for connecting at associations has changed as a result of Web 2.0 which brings many free and innovative ways to connect into our lives. AIIP is a great organization that has taken advantage of Web 2.0 which Arthur Weiss introduced me to several years ago. Our membership is quite different from SCIP's in that we're all small business owners, so we tend to be entrepreneurial in order to thrive, whereas 80% or more of SCIP members are corporate practitioners. A question I have is how many corporate practitioners are going to be willing to invest in the time it takes away from their work to participate in social networks? Most members of our CI Ning are consultants. Most of the forums are led by consultants.

However, I do think we can entice more corporate practitioners to join us, as long as their discussion doesn't disclose proprietary details about their companies. Much of our discussion on Ning doesn't go there. We need to think about the motivation for them to be engaged in Web 2.0.

I have invested almost 20 years in SCIP and even more time in CI, so I do hope it survives since we need CI to be represented centrally. It benefits us all in this community. Either way, count me into this community.

Ellen might be on to something on the vendor/practitioner ratio here in Ning (practitioner right here). Certainly any vibrant community is going to need to have significant participation by practitioners to be viable. My intuition tells me this is easier for practitioners to be active participants (or consumers at least) with a "sanctioned" organization such as SCIP.

I think Arthur is right that a central organization like SCIP is going to be necessary if we are ever to proceed to any sort of legitimate certification of CI professionals (though I may be opening a can of worms there). What I hope the current financial situation will make apparent is the need to use new processes and technologies to reduce the costs of having such an organization (such as the cost of governance) and delivering greater member and community value at that lower cost.

Mark is right that there still is an important role for in-person conferences even in a Web 2.0 (and beyond) world. One of the ways to make that physical gathering valuable in our modern world is to break down the barriers between the physical and the virtual. I want people who for whatever reason cannot attend in person to join in the conversation in SOME way (podcast sessions, follow social postings a la Twitter, aggregate the RSS feeds of all of the presenters' blogs, etc.). Breaking down the real world/virtual world barrier will increase the value for all.

Another book every SCIP board member, staff member and active volunteer should be reading is Jeff Jarvis's "What Would Google Do?" He encourages us to ask what value we're really providing and what it is we're really selling. Companies can create surprising revenue streams and innovative business models by re-evaluating where the value they deliver really originates.

Just my $0.02 before I head out for a lunch meeting. I'm really enjoying reading the conversation here.

When SCIP put out an RFP with respect to building an electronic courseware for CI 101, my gut reaction was why? This community has the knowledge and can put the courseware in a wiki, along with other relevant resources such as ethics, pointers to key literature and news coverage of the space, legal rulings which affect us, and so on. With the future of SCIP itself being uncertain, I think there's more motivation to band together to build this sort of resource.