THE TRANSITION PERIOD IS OVER. This information remains here for historical reasons, but is not applicable anymore.
As you might have seen, we’ve had quite an exhaustive week of publications trying to provide you some context on what we’ve been doing during the last weeks, our Statutes, our Code of Conduct, our first Program Leads and the explanation of the Regional Representatives role (and the Temporary Regional Advisors that we’ll have during this first year).
There are still a lot of aspects under development to share, that we’ll try to give you some insight about in the next few weeks (judge levels, communication with other organizations, current main projects with working groups from the volunteers we asked for a few weeks ago…), and many other topics that will come out of your questions and feedback that we might need to elaborate on for the wider audience.
Nevertheless, after presenting you the operative framework that the IJP uses to develop our activities and having already started the process of registering the association, we’re ready to start getting Early Access Memberships to join us!
What is an Early Access Membership?
The IJP is in the process of being legally registered, and that might take 2-3 months to be completed. The Spanish law allows us to start operating as an entity, even if there’s still a bureaucratic process to finish, and that’s why we decided to start getting members, because the more we are working together in the same direction, the better we’ll achieve our goals.
However, we didn’t want to collect membership fees until we have our certification system defined and get the final confirmation from the government (we have a temporary Tax Identification Number that will become permanent at that moment).
Therefore, an Early Access Membership is a temporary “free membership” to the IJP that you can get while keeping your current Judge Academy level (until we start assigning IJP levels), and that will be valid until we collect membership fees.
You can look at it as an opportunity to join us, to start participating in our community (both through projects and sharing your opinion on the topics we discuss) and to be part of a bigger initiative. It will also help us to figure out the number of judges interested in joining us from all around the world, both to define internal processes to provide you an adequate service (wherever you live) and to trim down the membership fee as much as we can.
What if I’m already a member of another local association?
First things first, if you live in the US or Canada, Judge Foundry is your association. We’ve been in contact with them since the beginning and they provide a complete and customized service to these two countries, so it doesn’t make sense to open any access there at all.
For the rest of the world, as a general philosophy, our goal is not to replace your local association but to coexist with it. Just like we’ve said we’ve been in contact with Judge Foundry, we will collaborate with other Judge organizations and find the best way to move forward as a community – and ideally together. That being said, we can’t promise that you can benefit fully from a membership before any agreements are reached with your local association but we’re hopeful!
For now, especially while an Early Access Membership is free (more on that below), feel free to sign up to the IJP. This will ensure you stay in the loop and makes it easier for us to update you on any developments in our collaborations with your local association.
How do I join the IJP?
Once you’ve checked the previous section, we are happy to welcome you!
Click here on judge apps to get your Early Access Membership!
It will associate your APPS profile to the IJP and collect the information we need to give you an Early Access Membership.
To make this transition as seamless as possible, we set up the following avenues of support for you, should you run into any issues:
- If you have trouble syncing your Apps profile and/or level with Judge Academy, please fill in this form https://blogs.magicjudges.org/judgeapps/accounts/ . Please note it may take us several weeks to process all the requests.
- If you are an active Judge but chose not to be a paying Judge Academy member, use this form to provide evidence of your activity during the recent years. These cases will be covered on an individual basis, so we ask for your patience while we’re working on it.
- If you live in China or another country with difficulty accessing Google Forms, send us an email to registration@internationaljudgeprogram.org instead of using the forms above. We will do our best to accommodate you.
What about the membership fee? When will we have more news about it?
We know the membership fee is one of the aspects most of you might be concerned about. Why should I join you now if later maybe I dislike the membership fee and decide to not pay? Would be a quite reasonable question.
The answer is simple: Because we don’t think the membership fee will be a problem. We’re looking at keeping the fee as low as we can, while also having resources to run the program. Having preliminary numbers will also help us to achieve this, so by joining the IJP now you’re contributing to this goal. We’re not collecting any kind of payment info at this stage, so you always have the option to leave later if you don’t like it.
Last but not least, what can I expect from the IJP as a member?
And that’s the key question. Now that you know the “technical” details about how the IJP will operate and how to become a member, you might need extra motivation to make that final step.
First of all, we will provide international certification services to our members. We’re in contact with a number of major TOs from all over the world to collect feedback about their needs and will define the details of our certification system based on that, with the goal of making the IJP levels something useful and reliable for every TO. Finding a balance between the needed regional flexibility for certain levels and quality assurance of the whole system is the most complex task, but we’re getting there.
Secondly, we are a global community of judges, with plenty of people to meet and learn from, and as many potential projects to help as ideas and volunteers. Feedback and mentoring are two of our core values, and we expect them to be the pillars of anyone interested in improving as a judge in the IJP. Therefore, the more individuals and the more diverse we are, the more opportunities we will all have to learn and grow.
Third, we will invest in defending our members interests, and as an international organization, with numerous members, we should have a strong position to negotiate agreements or relationships with other big entities that we can all benefit from. This is an important point, since the world has changed a lot during the last few years and we believe that we need to restore judges’ trust in a global organization with its goals aligned with judges’ interests. Now, being part of the IJP gives you the possibility to contribute and actually change things from the inside, and that’s an important change in the status quo.
However, if these main reasons didn’t convince you about joining us, there’s another one: we are here to support you. Apart from the “global aspects”, we are looking to collaborate with the different regions to help cover their needs, promote and support mentoring activities such as conferences and local meetings, help judges with our past experiences and give judges a reason to keep growing and motivated. This is a global organization for the judges, owned by the judges. It’s an unique opportunity to be part of something new since the beginning and to contribute to shaping it.
