The Virtual Association
The ultimate goal of a virtual association is database driven.
Whether it is administrative or membership in nature, the virtual association will develop unique ways of capturing and using information. Virtual associations will understand the importance of organizing one or more databases, each with a purpose in mind to allow the end user the greatest amount of flexibility and convenience while at the same time making more efficient the administrative side of management. All databases will be web-enabled, and to some extent, built and maintained by the end user. Greater and greater responsibilities will be assigned to the database and will be hosted within the website. As associations learn how best to organize their information, more and more tools will be built and moved onto the web.Association websites used to be informational only
and were provided as a convenience for members and identity for the association itself. Maintaining them used to require as much of your time as was saved by having them, and using a website for actual administration was not even a thought. As for office administration, computer networking required peer to peer connections or expensive servers with even more expensive maintenance contracts.Websites for the virtual association will become the workstation itself, a virtual terminal where information is stored and used to transact routine functions of the association on the user end as well as the administration end. Even those functions that might now seem difficult to transfer to the web will become part of the virtual terminal. Laws, rules and policies will change (we see this happening already) to accommodate this inevitable transformation to the virtual association.