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BACKGROUND FOR WHY THIS IS BEING DONE: Sometime in the mid 1980's I decided to take a hiatus and essentially went to sleep for 15 years. When I re-awoke I found Mensa in a much declined state at both the local and national levels. Twenty years ago I was a part of a project within Mensa to re-examine our priorities and try to get back to some fundamental priciples about what Mensa was pretending to be. I don't think very many people will contest the fact that Mensa had, pretty much abandoned any pretext that it was anything more than an organization supporting a local group effort to simply provide a meeting ground for people with high IQ's to get together and socialize. For the past 20 years Mensa itself has been in decline. Membership numbers have shrunk 25% across the board. No local group has remained unscathed. The quality of the local groups and what they do has deteriorated. Somwhere else on this website the hows and whys of that decline will be explored, but suffice it to say that it is the intent of this "community website" to provide a venue for groups and individuals to turn their own situation around. I can expound at considerable length on the reasons for our decline but if you want to skip to the short cure for our problems I hope to be able to provide the means with this website. The internet and the ability to create a whole new world that Mensans can populate certainly can provide us with a "new tool" that can help us re-invent ourselves and get back to that "Promise of Mensa". Elsewhere as we progress, I can point to the proof that I have (my past ten months as LocSec of San Francisco Regional Mensa) for my claim of how easy it is for individual members and groups (however small) to take a run at how a moribund society can be re-invigorated. |