This graph shows the ICPS membership numbers over the last 25 years. The Blue line is renewals of old members, the red line is total membership. The green line is brand new members, and the aqua line is the peak for each given year.
Notice that the ICPS membership has been essentially flat at approximately 800 members from 1980 to 1995! Each year we consistently got about 150 brand new members, and each year we lost an equal number of old members.
Starting around 1995, the internet started to be a factor in our growth.
The purple line shows the growth of the CP mailing list membership, which has approximately equalled the average ICPS membership count since 1995. The slope of the growth trend is about 200 new members a year.
Another way to estimate the impact of the internet is to look at CP database access over the last 5 years.
This graph shows the CP database accesses per month. The big spike in accesses near 1999 is spurious and was due to a large number of people using a search engine trying to find out about HP's research in bio-medicine.
The CPDB page is currently hovering around 12000 unique address accesses per month. This is equivalent to every ICPS member making one access every 3 days.
In practice, I don't think this is what is happening. I think it is more likely that most of this volume is due to brand-new CP enthusiasts. Several of the major WEB yellow-page guides list the CP web page, and it has been referenced in several high-school and college level textbooks.
If we choose to make the ICPS easy for people to join and very visible on the web, we could generate a large amount of growth. However, the down side would be that the new members are likely to be mostly hobbiests and might insist on a reduction in the scientific content of the CPN. To decide whether we want to go in this direction, we would need to agree on our long-term goals. For instance, our biggest impact on the conservation front might be actualized by focussing on educating children. This might lead us towards a "populist" focus in our journal.
Alternatively, we could assume that someone else takes on this task (or we could do it with a second publication), and focus on just the scientific and horticultural issues.
I look forward to hearing the various opinions and participating in this debate.