Annual Membership Certification - 2016

Owned by Will Bakker -LU, RVC
Last updated: 04-Mar-2017 by Julia Bryan
5 min read

Country Certification Results

Summary of 2016 AGMs and yearly meetings

Key Documents

Schedule for Membership Certification, first posted to DPCA-Leadership, January 4, 2016

January 4-6 - during this period you can request a copy of your country committee membership list to help with your cleanup

January 7 - we will send membership lists to all country committees who have sent in their requests

January 31 - the IT team creates a last snapshot of your country membership list 

February 10 - by February 10th, I will have sent you your membership count along with the membership verification form

February 20 - all membership verification forms are due

 

More details: 
On January 31, in accordance with the DA Charter, the Global IT Committee will take a snapshot of the membership database. This snapshot is the data for the membership certification process. That means that any changes to the membership database made after the snapshot — including updates to the Last Verified Date field — will not be reflected in the membership count. (The time of the database snapshot will be midnight Vancouver time on Jan 31, which is February 1, 0800 UTC.)
By February 10, I (International Secretary) will send each Country Committee Chair a membership count based on the snapshot report and a certification form. (As always, many thanks to our IT volunteers, who do all the work to get membership counts from the snapshot on January 31.)
By February 20, each Country Committee Chair must have filled in their certification form, with the virtual signature of the Chair and the Secretary, to me (secretary@democratsabroad.org).
A Country Committee Chair may challenge the membership count for his or her Country Committee by submitting a different number and indicating on the certification form that the submitted number is not the same as that provided in the database snapshot report. In that situation, I will work with the Country Committee Chair and the Regional Vice Chair to resolve the discrepancy.

Keep in mind that certifying your membership count and sending your current bylaws are requirements for compliance with the DA Charter. Country Committees that are deemed out of compliance will not have votes at the DPCA Global Meeting. The final vote allocations depend on which Country Committees are in compliance and the final membership counts. So I will release the vote allocations in the second quarter of the year, after receiving the results of Country Committee elections all over the world.

Notice entitled "Change to criteria for membership certification: Last Verified Date", posted September 12, 2014

Cut down to matters relevant for the 2015 certification process

Dear DA Leaders,

On August 30, the DPCA ExCom adopted a plan to add the Last Verified Date field of membership database records to the criteria for counting members to determine the votes allocated to representatives of Country Committees regarding DPCA matters.

Section 5.4(d) of the DA Charter reads: "The Executive Committee shall establish from time to time the methods and procedures to be used by the Country Committees to verify and certify membership for all purposes under this Charter, with the maximum accuracy reasonably possible for an association such as Democrats Abroad.”

In the past, this meant counting the number of membership records assigned to a Country Committee and excluding records based on now-familiar criteria such as missing an address and a local phone number. Beginning with the membership count to be conducted in January 2015, an additional condition for counting a membership record will be: a Last Verified Date of no more than four (4) years from the date of the relevant count/snapshot.

Specifically, for the next membership certification process, a member shall count toward the allocation of votes to a Country Committee in 2015 only if the member’s database record has a Last Verified Date later than January 31, 2011. (( Please note that this is technically inaccurate: a member with a Last Verified Date of January 31, 2011 will be counted. Thus, the proper wording is: "Specifically, for the next membership certification process, a member shall count toward the allocation of votes to a Country Committee in 2015 only if the member’s database record has a Last Verified Date later than or equal to January 31, 2011." ))

For the technical details of how the Last Verified Date field works, please see Shari's post of August 4 to the DPCA-Leadership listserv.
...
The timing of this announcement is intended to complement rather than distract from Voter Registration and GOTV activities. The ExCom hopes to allow Country Committee leaders to recognize the additional benefit of updating members’ contact information during the phone-banking and member outreach of this critical pre-election period. For example, phonebanking sheets based on the IT & GOTV teams' template can be used to reimport member data, thus updating the LVD as well. (Contact Gail Fagen for more details.)

The Last Verified Date (LVD) proposal was formally proposed and presented at the April 2013 DPCA Global Meeting in London. During the January 2014 certification process of membership counts, the International Secretary distributed LVD counts for each Country Committee. The LVD adoption plan was presented again at the March 2014 DPCA Global Meeting in Washington - Crystal City. Most recently, Shari posted guidelines for the LVD field on August 4 on the DPCA-Leadership listserv.

The LVD feature of our membership database places a focus on having accurate, verifiable data on reliable Democratic voters. This is the same focus that we have seen throughout the Democratic Party, from being a key to OFA’s success in 2008 through to the overwhelming adoption by the DNC, state parties, and individual candidates for this year’s campaigns.

There is an additional benefit that may increase membership counts in the long run. In the past, Country Admins and Country Committee officers have deleted suspect records of members who couldn’t be reached. There was no middle ground between certifying a valid member and removing a member permanently.

The LVD criterion lifts the assumption that Country Committee officers certify the status of all members, regardless of when they were last contacted. Thus, it allows Country Committee officers to retain any number of records for follow-up and eliminates the practice of a hasty “cull” of suspect records just before certification deadlines. The set of membership records with “old” LVD dates are now a resource that can be tapped when time is available, rather than a liability to be excised in January of each year.
 ...
Yours,

Will Bakker, International Secretary

on behalf of the DPCA Executive Committee

For Reference

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