by
Peter Noble, President, 2012-2014
As an international professional society, SNAME recognizes that its membership dues structure may be burdensome for professionals in some lower income countries.
In an attempt to address this issue, the leadership of the Society took steps a few years ago to introduce a reduced fees schedule for countries identified by the World Bank as having low income & lower middle income, 25% of full dues and upper middle income, 50% of full dues.
In order to try to control some of the costs in delivering membership services to these members it was decided that SNAME would not send any hard-copy material such as our flagship technical magazine (mt), but would rather provide electronic access only.
In the “short-hand” of our member services office this has become known as International Electronic Membership. This has caused some confusion which I would like to clarify,
The grades of membership in SNAME remain as stated in our By-Laws, namely Fellow, Member, Affiliate etc. and the qualifications for such grades are dependent on level of education and experience. International Electronic Membership is not a grade of membership in SNAME. The fact that some of our members pay reduced fees due to the fact that they come from a World Bank designated lower income country and receive all of their membership services electronically, does not in any way effect their grade of membership.
With that background, I would like to encourage all our current members to think about recruiting new members and students from World Bank lower income nations. The 2011 Gross National Income (GNI) per capita annual income levels are as follows:
- Low income US$1,025 or less
- Lower middle income US$1,026 - $4,036
- Upper middle income US$4,036 - $12,275
- High income US$12, 276 or more
More information, including a data for specific countries, can be obtained at www.worldbank.org.
For those digitally savvy existing members who come from WB high income countries not eligible for reduced fees and who may prefer to receive all their membership services electronically, I ask for your patience. As you are probably aware, SNAME has been slowly working to becoming more “digital” and for the past several years we have gone back and forth on how much hard copy we should continue to develop in an age of Kindles, iPads and print-on-demand. During my tenure as your president I am making the planning for and implementation of an integrated electronically based SNAME Knowledge Management System a priority.