Hello everyone, Last month, most contributing members received an email asking to manually validate their activity on SPI's members website in order to keep their contributing member status. Since several members expressed misunderstanding in response to this email, I'd like to bring some clarifications.
SPI contributing members status has historically been determined by participation in votes, such as the yearly board election (see votes here: https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/votes/). As no such vote happened in recent years, SPI board voted a resolution to decide membership expiration on "last activity in the membership portal" in such a case (see https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/2023/2023-04-10.jln.1/). This is what I implemented and ran last month, which lead most members to receive the email prompting to validate their activity. Please note that logging in the membership portal is not sufficient to validate activity: members need to explicitly click on the "Update" link next to their Last Active date. We have implemented it this way in order to account for members who may not want to renew their membership. The actual cleaning of contributing members will happen on June 11th. As of today, 75 out of the 210 contributing members have not updated their activity and will be downgraded to non-contributing members. This high number is the reason I write this email: to clarify things and ensure the ping email was not dismissed or misunderstood by most of them. If you are one of these persons and wish to maintain membership, no need to worry: you can still restore your contributing member status in a one-click operation after the downgrade. I hope this clarifies things for everyone and I apologize if the wording of the email was not clear enough. Best regards, -- Célestin Matte, IT contractor for SPI
