Clarifications about SPI contributing members cleaning run

Hello everyone,

Last month, most contributing members received an email asking to
manually validate their activity on SPI's members website in order to
keep their contributing member status. Since several members expressed
misunderstanding in response to this email, I'd like to bring some
clarifications.

SPI contributing members status has historically been determined by
participation in votes, such as the yearly board election (see votes
here: https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/votes/). As no such vote
happened in recent years, SPI board voted a resolution to decide
membership expiration on "last activity in the membership portal" in
such a case (see
https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/resolutions/2023/2023-04-10.jln.1/).
This is what I implemented and ran last month, which lead most members to
receive the email prompting to validate their activity.

Please note that logging in the membership portal is not sufficient
to validate activity: members need to explicitly click on the "Update"
link next to their Last Active date. We have implemented it this way
in order to account for members who may not want to renew their
membership.

The actual cleaning of contributing members will happen on June
11th. As of today, 75 out of the 210 contributing members have not
updated their activity and will be downgraded to non-contributing
members. This high number is the reason I write this email: to clarify
things and ensure the ping email was not dismissed or misunderstood by
most of them. If you are one of these persons and wish to maintain
membership, no need to worry: you can still restore your contributing
member status in a one-click operation after the downgrade.

I hope this clarifies things for everyone and I apologize if the
wording of the email was not clear enough.

Best regards,
--
Célestin Matte, IT contractor for SPI