This question is for nonprofit, membership-based railway museums whose members elect their Board of Directors.

Most, if not all, state laws allow members access to the membership list in some way - ostensibly for campaigning, but to campaign, or otherwise contact the membership at large. Some states allow a nonprofit to keep their list private if they mail the piece for the campaigner.

The interesting thing is, the actual administration of these actions is done by the staff of the railway museum. Folks likely to have a strong political stake. In my experience, some railway museums happily provide it, and others will actually will break the law to avoid it.

Do you have any experiences or anecdotes?

We have no laws in Ontario requiring disclosure of membership lists to all members. Indeed, there is more of a trend toward protecting the privacy of individuals, for example, our federal "do not call" list aimed to clamp down on phone spam, and concerns about identity theft issues.

Our policy is to keep the membership lists private. Anybody requesting the list needs to have a good reason, and be trusted. We don't want our members' addresses and phone numbers abused for commercial (or other, possibly nefarious) reasons.

Steve Hunter
Cardinal, Ontario

RMEO

When I was Secretary, I've published a Membership Directory, available to any member. It included the names of the all the members, but any contact information is published with the permission of the member. The member may separately opt-in sharing their phone number, address, or email address. The default is not to share.

The list of members is public knowledge, in part because every member is voted in, and motions, seconds, a whether the motion passed is a minimum legal requirement for meeting minutes. (We've never failed to vote someone into membership.)

Having a membership directory helps to foster a sense of community and encourages participation.

-Mark

Membership lists should be available for inspection by current members. They should not be published and distributed, however. Many years ago, in the pre-internet era, a well-established historical society published a list that was distributed to each member. Very quickly members started receiving huge amounts of junk mail from a variety of railroad/railfan businesses, many of which were "fly-by-night" outfits. That was the last membership list that group published.

None of the railway museums or organizations that I have been with distributed membership lists. We certainly didn't offer them up voluntarily for inspection either. The organization of which I am presently an officer and Director maintains lists for operational purposes (crew calling, training and legal purposes) and distributed or posted on an "as needed" basis.

On the personal information matter, we limit the information collected to that required by law for operating personnel and general information for all other volunteers. All volunteer records fall under the classification of "Personnel Files" and are not open to public inspection. Member files that do not fall under that classification are generally treated as if they did, unless someone specifically asks to view a specific file.

Our member roster is in the member's only section of our website which is password protected. If you're a member of our Museum, you can view and download it if you want to.

Thanks!

Part of the risk is people who get stupid with the list. Or, who just get spyware. Spyware often scans your hard drive for lists like this, and those are snatched and resold to spammers or identity thieves, i.e. those con artists who robo-dial your home offering credit repair or refinancing.

In America there's been a fundamental shift in the attitude toward privacy. Time was, you didn't even think about guarding your social security number. "Stalker" only took its contemporary meaning 20 years ago. Nowadays, there's also the fact that computers can store so much information so easily. Amazon knows everything you ever looked at on Amazon. So does Doubleclick, a marketing company which "bugs" hundreds of major sites to learn what you like - nominally to target ads. Even scarier are sites like http://www.spokeo.com - type your name in and see.

This may seem like it's moving too fast - but the younger folks have never known a world without this kind of constant threat to privacy - and hence, they care about it a great deal more than older generations ever had a reason to.

The Europeans also get it. Unfortunately, they have reason. And that's a wrinkle for us, because we are bound by EU law regarding EU citizens. The EU Data Protection Directive is pretty restrictive, and museums who violate it face sanctions in Europe. It also directly contradicts some state laws and Bylaws.

Unless there is a way of vetting new members, I think it would be a minor business expense for anyone so inclined to purchase a membership, which would give them access to the list.

Nowadays, even restricting the available list to hard copy (such as supplying mailing labels for a proposed mailing) is no protection from unauthorized use, given the power of inexpensive optical character recognition software to re-digitize printed data.

I think the only way to protect members' privacy is for the list owner to put labels on third-party mailings and take the mail directly to the Post Office. That way, the sender has no way to get the addresses to which it is sent [EXCEPT that if the mailing is endorsed "Address Service Requested" they would get any address changes on file with USPS -- but the list owner's policy could forbid such endorsements]. A reasonable charge for labor (in addition to postage) is certainly appropriate. Of course, members should be allowed to opt out of any such use.

It would also be appropriate (maybe legally required?) to publish a privacy policy regarding use of members' information.

Good and evil can come from the sharing of memberships lists. I can appreciate the privacy issues as well. But on the other side of the coin is how does membership get past propaganda and limited view points given them? When most memberships are arm chair members and only a fraction are actively involved in the operation and other involvement of the society or museum it makes it difficult to inform what is really going on, or at least share different perspectives on what is going on.

If you read the blogs from the manager/BOD {in the case of non profits} you usually get a white washed version or at least a very slanted point of view or perspective. Not much different than reading the paper or watching national news coverage. Do you really think you are getting the truth or full picture? This to me is the flip side of not giving the membership the access to membership rosters. Trust me I do not like giving my personal info out either so I do see the other point of view as far as protecting identity info. If there is questionable things happening {use your own imagination} how does one contact the membership to actively inform them of abuses or questionable happenings? If you have ever been actively part of an organization that built up into a respectable museum and then watched it be run into the ground, you can see my side on why it might be nice to have a list available to membership. How one makes sure the members do not abuse this list is indeed questionable and impossible to enforce. Both points of view are vaild and both can have unintended consequences on all involved.

It is a very good subject and I sure don't have the answers to the debate. At times it is good business to not share all issues with the public/members, on the other hand secrecy and abuse of power is hard to stop when you can not inform your members when it happens. An uninformed membership can loose the whole reason for existing and not be aware of what is happening, just like having the general public kept in the dark or complacent and then have them vote. By the time people are aware of trouble the mid point has been crossed over and there is no chance of returning to center, "All over but the crying" so to speak. Cheers, John.

At the CRHS, we've attacked the "management only" viewpoint problem by providing our members multiple venues for feedback.

Our website has a forum (like this one) where any member can sign up and post (under their own names). However, many of the forums are not open to the general public for viewing.

We've also got a Facebook page that anyone who's a fan (not just members) can use to communicate publicly and a twitter account that people can communicate with.

John, you raise a good point. And the law seems to agree. The state laws I've read seem single minded in protectng insurgent members' rights to campaign toward the organization's interest. That makes sense. Protecting dialogue and debate is very American.

One place insurgents go wrong, though, is presuming their own innocence. They don't actively prove their good intent, and management leans heavily on that in court: "We have no idea of his purpose, and for all we know, he wants to mail sex-toy catalogs to our members." That's where you want a very public pattern/history of advocacy - and today that looks a lot like websites/blogs.

Another problem you get with "membership at large" is often, museums actively promote family memberships to Muggles as a "family annual pass". Now these people don't have any familiarity with what's going on, except what they get told, so if management locks down the list, that's an even greater issue.


Yup, that is true. Freedom of the press belongs to them that owns presses. It's well understood that a blog is "owned" by its publisher, and comments are controlled. It is less well understood that forums are exactly the same way -- a lot of misunderstandings follow from the wrong notion that free speech applies on forums. This is one reason I don't expect an official forum to be a curative for whitewashing within an organization: a disagreeing forum leader can delete posts, lock threads, or simply fail to enforce decorum on your enemies.