BIRTHDAYS TODAY AND EVERYDAY 22 DECEMBER, 2013 TO 21 JANUARY 2014 . IUOMA's 'REAL' MEMBERSHIP

[Valentine Mark Herman]

I have been 'monitoring' those IUOMA members whose Birthdays have appeared on the 'Birthdays Today' part of this site. I started this, because I did not recognise many of their names, and wondered if they were indeed active members of IUOMA?

This led me to try and define what an 'Active Member' was, and to see how many of those whose birthdays were listed are indeed active.

I found that about 1 in 5 of them were active, and extrapolated from this that the Active Membership of IUOMA (based on the starting figure of 3263 Members on 22 December, 2013, was, at the end of the month's analysis, about 630.

The daily statistics for the month long period are below. (As are the methodological and statistical shortcomings, of which I am only too well aware.)
Mark Twain wrote that there are 'Lies, damned lies, and statistics', and you can read whatever you like into my statistics (and lies!).

I draw the following conclusions from them:

i) about 20% of IUOMA's Members are 'Active' as I have defined it.

ii) the remaining 80% may or may not be active Mail Artists outside the IUOMA network

iii) at one time this 80% were active IUOMA Mail Artists --that's why they joined (but see vii) below!)

iv) it is not necessary to be in any network to be a Mail Artist (well, I suppose you have to have at least one other person in your network to send Mail Art too!)

v) within IUOMA, a small number of people are responsible for a large amount of activity. They are the 'Super Actives'.

vi) as to the rest of us, well, we have different levels of Mail Art activity. I see it a bit like a love affair: start enthusiastically and with great passion, but then what you do and how vigorously you do it sort of tails off over time, and eventually you just get to live with your Mail Art personage.

vii) many IUOMA Mail Artists have been and gone, and, I trust, are still Mail Arting. As Mail Art is supposed to be enjoyable, and it certainly is for me, I would like to dedicate this whole Blog to one of our number who you have probably never heard of, but whose approach to Mail Art somehow seems to encapsulate what it is all about: fun. This is Deletemeplease's profile:

Deletmeplease's Page

Profile Information

Mail-Artist since:

never

My Website:

http://deleteme.com

Why I am involved in Mail-Art:

i'm not

My Mail-Adress (snail and/or E-mail)

[e-mail]

She bcame a member of IUOMA, joined one Group, but never posted a message, photo, or blog, or joined a discussion, and has not been heard of or from since.

Vive Mme Deletemeplease!

Here is the detailed analysis...

 

I always look at the 'Birthdays Today' part of this web-site. Do you?

Many of the names I do not recognise, so I look at their pages, and what do I find?

Simply, that many of them are inactive in IUOMA -- they don't post any messages, they don't receive any messages, they haven't been heard from for a long time, they don't join Groups, they don't have Friends, they don't post Photos, etc.

Indeed some Members just seem to join, get welcomed from a few of us, and then...poof! .... they vanish.

They -- and indeed some of the Members of IUOMA from way back in time -- might in fact be dead. (I don't suppose that they left behind a message saying 'Please remove my name from IUOMA'.)

I've decided to keep track for a month or so of who is active in IUOMA, using the 'Birthdays Today' information, as I am curious as to how many 'real'  -- ie active and participatory -- Members we have.

I record Members as being either 'Inactive' or 'Active'. If I'm uncertain as to which they are, I count them as 'Active'. The 'Active' Members are then expressed as a % age of those having Birthdays. The final figure is a prediction of the number of 'Active' Members, based on the starting membership figure of 3,263.

(I KNOW this has methodological deficiencies -- not everyone provides their date of birth; some people may be active in Mail Art, but not in the IUOMA context; the Inactive/Active distinction is simple; birthdays might not be randomly distributed throughout the year; the 30 day period I have chosen is atypical; the 'sample' size is too small etc -- but in the absence of anything better, it's as good an indicator as any other, such as, for example, selecting one name from each of the 156 pages listing IUOMA's 3263 members. AND it is based on a fairly random sample of 200+ names For more on this, please look at the comments below).

So I will be listing what I find in the following 6 columns:

                                                                                                                                    Number of Predicted

Date       No of Birthdays  Inactive Members  Active Members   % Active          Members

Two sets of data are included, eg 11(17)  -- the first the number for that day, the second the cumulative total/%age for that column. I will analyse the Birthdays that are listed here from 22 December, 2013 to 21 January, 2014 for one month.

Here we go:

                                                                                                                                      Number of Predicted

Date    No of Birthdays  Inactive Members   Active Members       % Active        Members

2013

22 Dec         6 (6)                        4 (4)                           2 (2)                          33 (2/6)               1076

23 Dec       11 (17)                      7 (11)                         4 (6)                          35 (6/17)             1142

24 Dec         9 (26)                      7 (18)                         2 (8)                          31 (8/26)             1011 

25 Dec         8 (34)                      7 (25)                         1 (9)                          26 (9/34)               860

                    (It was Jesus' Birthday! He was made an Honorary Member of IUOMA!)

26 Dec         7 (41)                      9 (34)                          0 (9)                         21 (9/43)               685

27 Dec         4 (45)                      3 (35)                          1 (10)                       22 (10/45)             717           

28 Dec         7 (52)                      3 (38)                          4 (14)                       27 (14/52)             876

29 Dec         8 (60)                      7 (45)                          1 (15)                       25 (15/60)             815

30 Dec         7 (67)                      5 (50)                          2 (17)                       25 (17/67)             815

31 Dec         5 (72)                      4 (54)                          1 (18)                       25 (18/72)             815

2014

1 Jan           19 (91)                   18 (72)                          2 (19)                       21 (19/91)             681

2 Jan             7 (98)                     6 (78)                          1 (20)                       20 (20/98)             665

3 Jan             8 (106)                   7 (85)                          1 (21)                       20 (21/106)           646

4 Jan             2 (108)                   2 (87)                          0 (21)                       19 (21/108)           632

5 Jan             9 (117)                   7 (94)                          2 (23)                       19 (23/117)           638

6 Jan           11 (128)                 10 (104)                        1 (24)                       19 (24/128)           611

7 Jan             7 (135)                   6 (110)                        1 (25)                       18 (25/135)           604

8 Jan             8 (143)                   8 (118)                        0 (25)                       17 (25/143)           570

9 Jan             7 (150)                   6 (124)                        1 (26)                       17 (26/150)           565

10 Jan         11 (161)                 10 (134)                        1 (27)                       17 (27/161)           547

11 Jan           3 (164)                   3 (137)                        0 (27)                       16 (27/164)           537

12 Jan           7 (171)                   5 (142)                        2 (29)                       17 (29/171)           553

13 Jan           7 (178)                   4 (146)                        3 (32)                       18 (32/178)           586

14 Jan           5 (183)                   4 (150)                        1 (33)                       18 (33/183)           588   

15 Jan           6 (189)                   3 (153)                        3 (36)                       19 (36/189)           617

16 Jan           3 (192)                   3 (156)                        0 (36)                       18 (36/192)           611

17 Jan         13 (205)                   9 (165)                        4 (40)                       19  (40/205)          636

18 Jan         12 (217)                  10 (175)                       2 (42)                       19 (42/217)           631

19 Jan           6 (223)                    4 (179)                       2 (44)                       20 (44/223)           643

20 Jan           9 (232)                    8 (187)                       1 (45)                       19 (45/232)           632

21 Jan.        11 (243)                    9 (196)                       2 (47)                       19  (47/243)          630

THE END

                      

                                                     

[Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat)]

Someone has a birthday today...not listed at IUOMA,

but nonetheless :

Recorded, noted, tallied, now part of the statistics :-)

[Prairie Kittin]

I am not very "active" on the site. I AM, however, very active off the site. I send mail art to somebody at least once or twice a week. And, I've been getting the coolest mail in return!! I love this Union. I've figuratively "met" some great people and fantastic artists here.

[Valentine Mark Herman]

1000 views!

Wow.

[Valentine Mark Herman]

We should be sending Happy Birthday messages to those IUOMA Members whom we know to be really 'active'. For me, today's Very Special Birthday Girl is Theresa Williams: Happy Birtjday Theresa!

[Ruud Janssen]

pageviews can be multiple visits from the same visitors. The number for visitors however is based on the IP numbers people use, and only counts unique visitors.

[Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat)]

Here's a question about counting "page views", for example there are now more than 900 views on this blog, but that does not mean that 900 people viewed it...someone can have it on a sort-of-automatic-click-on, and their computer is "viewing" here 20 or 50 times a day, right?

[Katerina Nikoltsou (MomKat)]

Hmmm, and another question about "page views":

Can ning count "views" of our private messages to "friends"?

Must be a whole lot of activity there recently!

[Ruud Janssen]

if you click on the images they become full screen....

[Eraser Heed]

Thanks for the info Val et Ruud.

IUOMA is a fantastic way to be introduced to mail art in and it is a very accessible place/idea and a lot of people is drawn to it therefore, I think. Holding onto an active membership is fun but demands quite an effort too, time wise and money wise. The good thing is to be able to have this platform and come and go as we please. The accessibility in IUOMA is the key to high numbers inactive members but also its success. You have  already said this but.. In a way, internet have made mail art even more democratic. Mail art is developing.

[Valentine Mark Herman]

Ruud: thanks for the statistics (I had to take a magnifying glass to the creen to read them!) 2M+ page views is an awful lot: wow!

xx: I suspect that you are right and that the 20:80 (Pareto) principle would apply to the 20% Active members. (Would it also apply to that 20% too...and so ad infinitum If so one could become very reductionist indeed, and find that IUOMA is really a very small network of....ErniB, KaterinaN, GuidoV, DVS, and perhaps just a very few more folks)