By now, you have received your 2010 West Region CSI Membership Directory. Contrary to our directory in past years, this year the roster for each chapter contains only home chapter members. This is an unfortunate situation since many of us are members of multiple chapters. As a result, the person you dine with at your chapter meeting every month may be a member of your chapter even though you don’t see them listed in the directory. We sincerely apologize for this error in producing the directory.
It seems the problem resulted from incomplete membership data we provided to McGraw Hill. By our agreement with McGraw Hill, it is CSI's responsibility to provide McGraw Hill with the member data which they use to produce the directory. As we've done in past years, I requested the region membership spreadsheet from the Institute in May and forwarded it to McGraw Hill.
In other years, this procedure has worked with only minor glitches.
The problem wasn't brought to my attention until near the end of the proofing process when the Inland Empire Chapter noticed not all their members were shown. At that point, I wasn't sure whether or not this was an isolated problem. It was also getting too late to do anything about it since we had a production schedule to meet with McGraw Hill. After making the relatively few changes for the Inland Empire Chapter, I made the decision to proceed with the data CSI provided to McGraw Hill. Even assuming that we could have assembled the data showing members with multiple memberships, providing it at that late date would have meant more time and more cost for West Region, since McGraw Hill would have had to start over with their data entry and formatting.
This is really an unfortunate situation since the region membership directory has become such a useful member benefit. This usefulness will be diminished in 2010, along with the more important fact that each chapter's membership will not be presented accurately. We will make every effort to avoid repeating this mistake next year.