How did we get here? The good old days

A couple of years ago I wrote two articles about how the number of CSI members and CSI chapters How did we get here? Membership, which showed how total membership changed over the years, and How did we get here? Chapters, which looked at the change in the number of chapters during the same time.

One of the things that has plagued CSI for some time is a lack of a tangible something of value.
For a very long time, CSI offered useful things of real value. The first part of our membership curve suggests CSI must have had something that brought in new members and led to the creation of new chapters. Let's see if we can discover what that something was.

Bylaws again?

I suspect most members have not read their chapter, region, or Institute bylaws. Until I became a chapter president in 2001, I gave them little attention myself; I figured they were someone else's problem. The general reluctance even to look at bylaws is not surprising; often written in the legalese we all love to hate, their very appearance can be intimidating, and it seems the only time we look at them is when we're in trouble.

Why revise them again? Because we are in trouble.