[Ansteorra] Re: Non-member data

[Marc Carlson]

>From: "Paul E. Kiefer, Jr." <rapierman at yahoo.com>
> > But in both cases all this tells us is the number of registrations,
> > many of these are multiple registrations by the same people. I
> > know I paid the NMS myself at least half-a-dozen times this year
> > while my Lady would count for over a dozen of the member
> > registrations.....
>Granted.  The only true and accurate way to measure a membership is by
>a census (and, judging by the way the way the US Census gets answered,
>I seriously doubt that we'll ever get complete cooperation anyway).

Just a brief comment.  Several years ago I made an attempt to determine just 
how many people there actually were in the Barony I live in.  People tend to 
fall into a variety of different categories whic make getting any accurate 
numbers really difficult, of which paid membership IS the most convenient to 
work with.   It seems easy enough to determine that these folks are current 
active members, those folks stopped playing years ago, and them other folks 
over there just show up whenever they get the urge.

Where do you draw the line between an "active" member and an "inactive" one? 
  Someone who's at least shown up at something local in the past year?  An 
event?  We have several people here who consider themselves "active" but 
never seem to go to anything or appear to do anything (and can get pretty 
hostile about it :) ) - they just do their household stuff and that's it.   
Personally, I'm currently not a -paid- member, and I rarely attend events, 
unless it's to teach classes, but I consider myself somewhat active locally, 
but there are certainly people who don't feel that's enough.

For these reasons, I'm not sure a -real- census would even be possible, 
without even getting to the garbage answers that some people are prone to 
give out.

Marc/Diarmaid

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