Membership Survey

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 79

It’s important that the BAA committee have some feeling for who are our members and for what the membership wants, because what we dream up in the seclusion of committee meetings can represent the ideas of a non-typical section of the membership.

So we thought we’d ask the membership a few questions (people who send back replies are another non-typical section – if what we find doesn’t reflect your views and you didn’t reply to the questionnaire you know who to blame); we did something similar a few years ago to try and see what we could do about meetings, this time we cast the net wider.

The results are presented in percentage terms as far as possible, not all adding up to 100% for the customary reasons, and we also show the total number of responses for each question.

Comments on the results are Dick Bowman’s alone. To get the analysis printed as soon as we could meant that there wasn’t time for a committee consensus to be gathered. In essence the committee would like to run the Association the way the members want, but sometimes it is difficult to choose between alternative ideas. I hope these comments will give you some better idea of what I believe we need to do. At the time of writing this there has been no committee discussion of the results – but it should be in progress by the time this appears. This is your Association and if you want things to happen your way – participate (in whatever way you can).

General Information¶

What type of BAA Member are you?

Fairly obviously the British APL Association isn’t just British; we have a significant foreign membership and for this to continue we need to offer a blend of services which satisfies all. Interestingly we have no replies from Sustaining Members.

When did you join?

No great surprise here.

What other APL interest groups do you belong to?

Other groups named included New England, FinnAPL, Swiss, Quebec, APLBUG and QL/APL. Interestingly only around 25% of our respondents belong to any other group.

What professional bodies do you belong to?

We combined bodies which represented similar interests; multiple memberships were common. Wouldn’t it be nice to have these percentages symmetrical (20% of BCS members also joining BAA)? Clearly we see a tendency for APLers to be involved with disciplines outside of computing.

What implementations of APL do you use?

Access to multiple APLs was common and it’s nice to see that we can attract members who have no APL. I personally was surprised by the level reached by APL*PLUS/PC; are these people brought into APL by the PC and the product, or are they longstanding APLers using the PC alongside a mainframe implementation or even deserting other APLs completely. We make no claims for this being any form of market share survey – outraged vendors please note; but the BAA would be more than happy to receive and publish a comprehensive APL market study.

What areas do you work in?

Again, multiple responses were common, and the spread is good; we can feel assured that APL is able to cross application boundaries (OK, we all knew it – now we have some evidence). We got 15 ‘other’ areas.

How many people are there in your company using APL?

We even got a multiple response here. The saddle effect isn’t surprising, what’s gratifying is just what a high proportion of respondents fell into the highest category. Maybe we should also have asked for an exact number – just what is the highest number in any one organisation?

Are they all BAA members?

Clearly we have some way to go before BAA membership is seen as an essential part of being an APL user; remember also that this survey couldn’t contact places where the BAA has no member.

Is the use of APL in your company increasing/decreasing/static?

This looks pretty good.

If the use is decreasing, what is replacing APL?

‘Other’ included Cobol and RPG! Note the low response level – we appear to face no ‘universal APL killer’ and I wonder whether we need to get too upset about the nature of some of the work going elsewhere (was it that good a match for APL originally?).

Do you use APL at home/work?

Introducing our new membership category – domestic members! Perhaps I should charge twice the individual member rate until you show me the receipt for your home APL interpreter. My congratulations also to the person who uses APL2 ‘at home’. One thing that’s missing in this analysis is any attempt to correlate replies between questions – it ought to be done really, and volunteers are welcomed.

a) Nice to see Vector going down well, the general tone of response indicating that it well satisfies the technical APLer.

b) Clearly a problem area. What’s happening with meeting reports is that speakers are relying on others to pass on their words in writing; what is supposed to happen is that speakers supply their own article to Vector – speaking at a meeting is analogous to presentation of a paper. As a speaker you should not be happy leaving it to someone else to represent what you have to say to the much wider audience of Vector readers?

c) Vendors please note.

d) How do we make a product guide interesting – suggestions?

e) What would make the book list more interesting? Economic reality tells us that the BAA’s USP in this area is making publications available which aren’t available via normal commercial avenues. More books based around APL would seem welcome.

f) We can only review what’s published.

g) Clearly PDSL is going down well, even on the little information you have so far.

h) Competitions are also a problem area – they take a lot of effort to devise and even more to judge.

Suggestions¶

We received many and they’re being looked into; why not put a bit more flesh around your ideas and/or suggest authors (why not yourself)?

How many people read your copy of Vector?

Caught you; this was a trap question. It’s a little disturbing that nearly half the copies of Vector get read by more than one person, because that means that there are lots of people out there getting the benefits for free. The only thing that lets us publish is our income and the freeloaders don’t give us any; if you’re lending out your copy of Vector you’re damaging your own interests because it stops us from growing and improving our service. What I’m happy about is a loan that turns into a membership, but if you pass your copy around the same people time after time perhaps it would be interesting to see what would happen if you stopped. Ed: Many of us on the committee hold the other view. Please show Vector to more people, not less. If 100 people read each copy of Vector I would be delighted – we’d find it easier to recruit more members and sell more advertisements (which contribute a major part of the cost of producing Vector). Lending out Vector, far from damaging the BAA, does us good, you good and the future of APL good. Ignore Dick Bowman on this please.

BAA Technical Meetings¶

Quantity of response about meetings was much lower because many of our respondents couldn’t attend. Clearly we need to improve the meetings – the ratings are in general far too low. Panels are particularly bad – the problem here is that we’ve resorted to a panel discussion when ideas got a bit thin; in theory they should work (get a few people with strong viewpoints to argue), in practice they’ve tended to have too little preparation put into them. Workshops you can’t fake – to be any good everybody knows that they need a lot of work. Talks could also be better prepared, presented and written up in Vector.

What we need here is participation again – lots of you gave us ideas and we’d like to see you take them a step further; the platform’s there if you want to use it. If you think things are dull then surely you could do better.

Do you attend the BAA technical meetings?

Meetings are a minority activity, but valuable to those who can attend and should get with material for Vector Ed: and allow members direct access to committee members.

If you don’t attend many meetings, why?

Given the geographic spread of our membership this isn’t very surprising. At least the meeting topics seem relevant.

Would you attend more meetings if we changed the time?

Perhaps we should try the occasional evening meeting.

Would you prefer meetings to be held in a different location?

The bare numbers suggest we could try somewhere else, your suggestions make it more difficult. I am happy to arrange meetings in San Jose, France, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Texas, New York and Luxembourg provided that all expenses are met by the audience; closer to home we’ve had meetings in places like Birmingham and I believe we did something in Manchester also. The problem is how many (or few) members we can find within travelling distance of a venue – if you want to set something up let us know and we’ll help if we can (we’re interested in supporting local groups).

Suggestions¶

There were plenty. If you were really keen on yours please take it up with the committee by describing it to them in more detail.

Other Areas of BAA Activity¶

Which existing BAA services are of value to you?

The main ‘other’ suggestion was contact with other APL users. We need to improve the value attached to technical meetings particularly – as I said above, it’s a seed from which much more of what we do grows.

How would you allocate the annual budget?

The ‘actual’ figures are based on 1986/7 budget estimates (as they were allocated to different categories I have done a reallocation as well as I can). The balance between Vector and meetings is different and I hope that what you’ve seen above explains something of why this happens. Overall the resemblance between the average and what we actually do isn’t at all bad.

If the BAA were to drop one of these topics, which?

Not that we have any plans to drop anything . . . Interestingly two things which haven’t really come to fruition are prime candidates for being dropped (other publications and projects) – how do you know what they’ll manifest themselves as. Something else we’ve done very little of is straightforward propaganda. Interesting though that propaganda was the single biggest positive suggestion in the next question. Ed: perhaps describing it as “Barefaced” encouraged people to disapprove of it and if the questionnaire had offered “Intelligent promotion of APL” there would have been a different response. It is important that the BAA should decide whether we are happy just to serve the needs of the APL user or whether we should spend effort on spreading the word? How do we get the message of APL across to a wider audience? We (neither the BAA nor APL as a whole) aren’t going to grow by being introspective.

Suggestions/comments¶

Again lots of them, which we’ll be following up

The BAA committee is grateful to everyone who took the time and trouble to send us a reply; it’s given us a lot to think about. I hope that this analysis will provoke you to further positive action in making the BAA a better organisation.

See page 36 for Prize Draw results