Hi all (Organising Committee members),

Two things to bring up:

1. Formal membership

In the last meeting (see start of recording June 6th 2025), Rasha brought up the question again of allowing people to formally register as ISCET ‘members’. There was no objection to doing so now (Amanda, Robert and I were present from the Organising Committee), so long as this not a paid-for membership (at the moment our only cost is the website hosting, which I have got covered until March 2027 via my research sabbatical). As I understand it, the benefits of formal registration are:

1. It allows ISCET to describe its membership in terms of numbers/locations/professions (which currently we can only do vaguely based on the number of people signed up to the email distribution list)
2. At some point (i.e. if we are not fully able to fund ISCET through grants), we would be able to easily reach members to request payment of an annual fee to cover ongoing costs in exchange for continued membership. (Ironically though, moving to a formal membership may necessitate the use of a membership management system such as WildApricot, which would actually increase our costs — so this will need careful thought.)

There are three questions that we should answer before going ahead:

1. What are our obligations with regards to data security (i.e. where are the data held, who is responsible for it?) We will need to make sure we understand this fully. If this would require us to use a platform like WildApricot, can we afford to do this right now? I personally don’t think now is the right time to ask members to pay for membership, so would suggest we only do this if we can do it for free.
2. What data will we hold about members? How much of this should be optional?
3. Who will organise this in the long-run? Rasha has offered to handle this for now, but I wonder if in time we would want a dedicated membership secretary.

2. Deciding when to move to a formal (voted) organising committee

Since the formation of the society, we have said that our roles as the Organising Committee (including my own role) are time-limited, and that when the society is more established and self-sufficient, there will be a formal process for electing members to the Organising Committee. It will need to be decided (by the wider group) whether current Organising Committee members will be able to put themselves forward again, should they wish.

I think it would be wise to now determine when that time will be, to avoid it being open-ended. In my view, a good time would be following the publication of the first ISCET guideline — please let me know your thoughts on this proposal. We don’t know exactly how long the guideline development process will take, but at a guess I’d expect this to be roughly a year away. In the nearly 2½ years since ISCET was founded we have seen a lot of growth and ISCET is now widely accepted as the professional and standards body for clinical eyetracking, so we have achieved a lot in terms of bringing the society to this point from nothing. Having a defined end-point may also prompt us to think about anything else we would like to achieve during our tenure as a committee.

In other news, I have split the ‘About’ page on the website so there is now a new page (‘People‘) which now lists each of the subcommittees, since I realised these were not currently recorded anywhere.

All the best,

Matt