petition started to give to ILDA

[hakzaw1]

In hopes of ILDA creating a new membership catagory for hobiests similar to the one they have for students I have started a petition.


Currently the cost per year is $125 iirc for a member that is not a student-- they can join for iirc $50 per yr. There are more 'catagories' that cost more.

Anyone just getting into projectors are faced with a lot of expensive gear and SW so $125 may keep them away from ILDA.

I have started a petition to ask ILDA to add the hobbiest to the student group or designate a user group that is also only $50 per year, personally it would not bother me to not have voting privledges etc but would still like to help support ILDA and get their newsletters and be able to display the ILDA logo in my posts.

In November there will be a big conferance for ILDA in San Antonio Tx.

I will be there and will address this issue and present the petition- SO I need names to make them see that they are losing out of member fees to us hobbiests. ILDA needs to know that we are serious about both lasershows and safety. They are excluding future Pros by not allowing an affordable option. We are not trying to steal gigs from those who have gotten a variance and are compliant(C&V).

Some of the hobbiest will never do this and become C&V , while many surely will.

We will also be asking for a new catagory in the awards for the novice/beginner/hobbiest--

People who can influence ILDA about this are Bill Benner of Pangolin, Tim Walsh of LaserSpecticals (Sam MarcosTX and past pres. AND the founders of ILDA) and Dr. Charles Maricle of AixiZ Lasers and an ILDA corperate sponsor & conference sponsor. You can also help us greatly on this by sending your opinion directly to ILDA and all three of these members.


thanks for reading this and PLEASE send me a PM with your name so I can add your to our petition. Of course being on the petition is not binding.


Please put ILDA PETITION IN THE HEADING.
V/R
hak(LEN)

[buffo]

Good luck with this Len. I hope you succeed. PM sent.

However, I will tell you that at the 2010 conference, I tried to convince them to make these very same changes, and I failed utterly.

At that conference, I was asked to give a presentation about SELEM and the hobbyist movement. (Remember that this was right after the news of the cheap Ca$io blue diodes broke, so there was a lot of interest in what the hobbyist community was doing.)

The discussion that followed my presentation led to the membership changes that Patrick Murphy and Tim Walsh had already been thinking about, and that I strongly favored. During the discussion, I spoke about PL, and explained that even though people get a *huge* benefit from the forums here, the vast majority of the members can't justify spending $120 per year to support the forums. With that in mind, how did ILDA ever expect to entice new hobbyist users to join ILDA for $125. But $50 for a student/hobbyist membership (with no voting rights) seemed like a nice compromise.

I also suggested that for the "individual member" class, that those members be allowed to perform laser shows commercially under a company name. (Right now the rules say that you can't do that unless you step up to the $250 corporate member level.) If you an individual member, you can only do business under your real name (such as "Don Smith Lasers"). If you make a company called "Lasers-R-Us", you can't identify yourself as an ilda member anymore without paying the extra cash. So any hobbyist who might want to "go legit", get their variance, and do a couple shows a year for their local nightclub is now thrown into the same membership category as companies much, much larger.

This discussion lasted for a good 20 minutes or so, and included several different options for the various changes to the membership rules, especially with regard to the individual membership category. I actually proposed two different options myself: a dollar limit per year in gross receipts, and limiting the "individual" membership to any company consisting of just one person (rather than a company like Pangolin that has several employees). Honestly, we spent more time on this subject, because it seemed that everyone was in favor of the hobbyist category already, so we sort of ignored that after it was first proposed.

What you need to understand is that after the discussion had really gotten good and it appeared that something might actually get voted on, the mood suddenly changed in the room. A few senior members spoke a few words dismissing ALL the topics under discussion, and that was the end of it.

EVERYTHING that had been suggested, both by me and by others who were keen on courting the hobbyist community was summarily dismissed by a few senior ILDA members who run some of the larger laser light show companies. The excuse was (and here I'm quoting verbatim: ) "If those people want to be in ILDA, they need to put their big girl panties on and pay what everyone else pays."

So that's what you're up against. With just a few sentences, the entire discussion was shut down, and nothing has been done about it since. Honestly, I didn't know what to say after being hit with that, and I still don't know how to answer it.

The problem is that there are two schools of thought within ILDA. Some members (including Tim Walsh, Patrick Murphy, and others) believe that the hobbyist crowd can breathe new life into the organization, and that by encouraging them to join, the organization will grow, not just in money received from dues, but by increasing it's influence among the community and "plugging in" to some of the very cool hobbyist ideas, such as the Ca$io 445 nm blue diodes.

Other members believe that ILDA is just fine the way it is, and they'd rather keep it as a "seniors club" where only the big boys are allowed. They don't care if the dues have to go up to keep ILDA alive, because they can all easily afford it. But they *DON'T* want the organization to be overrun by all the little people. And keeping the dues high is one way to ensure that.

Now, to a certain extent, I can understand their concern. Think back to some of the senseless drama you've seen on this forum, as well as on LPF, and imagine what that could do to a corporation's reputation if the professional organization representing their industry devolved to that level. Fair enough.

In the end though, I still side with Tim and others, in that I believe the hobbyist community has a lot to offer, and the risks of diluting the ILDA name are minimal. But my arguments to support this position fell on deaf ears. Honestly, I gave it my best shot, and it wasn't even close.

Note also that Tim Walsh was recently voted out as the president of the organization. He was perhaps the most vocal champion of the idea to reach out to the hobbyist community, and they voted him out just as he was getting ready to host a conference in his home town. So that should tell you something about the attitude the organization has towards us.

I hope you have better luck than I did, but I'm not very optimistic about your chances for success.

Adam

[dnar]

You guys should join LIDA instead. It's much cheaper and you only need little girl panties.

[gabe]

I feel like its less than the price, but more that the ILDA seems to be run by big corporate business owners that couldn't care less about how the smaller part of the industry is as long as they get a paycheck.

Maybe that's a wrong impression, but that's what I see.

[JohnYayas]

Len, I also hope that you succeed. That said, if I was an ILDA member (and there is a reason I am not one), I probably wouldn't be for it. It kind of goes along with some of the attitude that Buffo came up against. If I was paying big bucks to be part of a professional organization I would not want a bunch of hobbiests who pay the price of a family meal at Outback Steakhouse as membership coming in and making a rucous in the the forums, meetings, etc. I'm not saying that WOULD happen, but it COULD happen, and as a professional, I would not want that. It would quickly take the professional out of the professional organization. Now, the reason I am not a member of ILDA is for a couple of reasons: (1) I got nothing out of it after paying as an individual one year. I signed up so that I could have access to their ILDA specs and make suggestions. Maybe I didn't look hard enough but I never actually found where they kept the specs, they weren't being updated, and the suggestion I made (which addressed an oversight in the specification that could lead to ambiguity) never really got much attention and was never added to a future version. Has there even been an update since then? Not that I know of. So, maybe I could have tried harder, but it wasn't worth it to me. Reason 2 is because the bickering on the ILDA list forum was so frickin' annoying that I had to have them take my name off of their mailing list. Everyone knows I'm a fan of bickering. (And for the record, I never posted so you can't blame it on me -haha). But, it was too much for me to see professionals bad mouthing each other and filliing my email with crap.

So, I would ask you: what do you expect to get out of ILDA even if you joined? I have my doubts that you would get anything out of it. And what do you think ILDA would get out of having you for what basically amounts to chump change. Now, I am not trying to belittle you or any other hobbiest. Just laying out my experience and how I can see others feeling about this.

Anyway, good luck. If you can change things to make it better for all then I am solidly behind you.

[JohnYayas]

PS There is already an organization for hobbiests. It's called PL. MixedGas once proposed badges. At the time, I thought it was foolish, mainly because of the entry criteria. But, if people simply want some badge or something that says they belong to a laserist organization then I can see it. Len, you are already a member of the LinkedIn Laser Show Professionals group I created. If you, or anyone else on here would like to take some leadership in that group and turn it into some sort of hobbiest level professional group I would gladly make you a mod or whatever it is you are in Linked In groups. But, I want to keep it at some mature level somewhat analogous to what ILDA is all about... except for free.

[DanG]

You know, this is an interesting (if not slightly disheartening) discussion because I see both sides.

On the one hand, $125 is a very modest fee for membership in a professional trade association. On the other hand $1,000 or so, which is what we have to pay, is a rather extreme fee in my experience. It seems like ILDA's fee structure was conceived to reflect the past state of the industry ... a small number of companies could get variances and thus could do the legitimate work. Consequently, a trade association MUST to be funded to function and so these few companies were asked to part with a very large membership fee. If the association needs X to function, and there are only 100 companies worldwide who would be members of such an association then one would have to structure a fee scale which funded the association properly from only 100 or so companies.

However, the argument could be easily made that circumstances have changed. The pool of laserists grows ever larger and ILDA is at a crossroads of sorts. Do we want to embrace the flood of passionate, but inexperienced laserists, DJ's, casual enthusiasts, etc. or keep the trade association more insular and focused on "professionals." Do we make a real effort to bring in the dedicated hobbyists with great voices while accepting that doing so will also probably result in some yahoo's signing up who will cause drama? Are their ways to curb this, absolutely. Are their ways to work on changing the perception of the culture within ILDA about which I have heard more than once, absolutely.

But, it is not accurate to say that ILDA just doesn't care about smaller companies or hobbyists. That view is, in my opinion, much too un-nuanced to be true. Sitting on the board, I can say with confidence that it is not the case. The industry is evolving and ILDA needs to evolve with it - but $125 is quite a reasonable annual membership fee in my opinion if one were to compare it to IAAPA, NAMM, ADJA, NAME, etc.

[chad]

EDIT: went back and re read Buffo's post. He nailed it. Nuff said....

chad

[flecom]

I also suggested that for the "individual member" class, that those members be allowed to perform laser shows commercially under a company name. (Right now the rules say that you can't do that unless you step up to the $250 corporate member level.) If you an individual member, you can only do business under your real name (such as "Don Smith Lasers").

thats one of the main reasons I did not renew my membership this year...

Now, to a certain extent, I can understand their concern. Think back to some of the senseless drama you've seen on this forum, as well as on LPF, and imagine what that could do to a corporation's reputation if the professional organization representing their industry devolved to that level. Fair enough.

this one made me laugh a bit, you DO read the laserist list right?

i think we actually have LESS drama than ILDA does on that list, man there are some gem's in there... from people calling each other out on audience scanning or other illegal shows to the bill benner is the devil emails, the hilarity is endless

in my opinion ILDA is just a left-over from a time that has passed.. same with the CDRH (although the CDRH will probably give up eventually until someone gets hurt, seems like every bar/club I go into has some kind of chinese laser display they bought from spencers or something blinking and flailing away)

[norty303]

I often think to myself, 'I should probably join ILDA', but then I ask myself 'what could ILDA actually do for me'?
At one time, it was to access the sekrit safety papers, but that time has passed.
At another time it was to experience the drama of the list, bbut that has passed.
At another time it was to use the logo, but to be honest, my LSO certificate carries much more weight in a commercial and safety world.

So I would agree that it seems to be a bit of an 'old boys' club, and your energies might be better placed elsewhere.