Communications Committee Report for December 2008.

The communications committee continues to meet approximately twice a month.
We have been working against our 2008 communications plan which will only
receive minor updates for 2009. We have accomplished a lot, but there is
still much left to do. Here is our progress against our 2008 communications
plan available at ie3col.eng.uab.edu/twiki/bin/view/R3econf/CommPlan2008 .

1. We set out to publish four newsletters a year and develop a feedback
mechanism to assess our results. The crunch of Sections Congress kept us
from meeting our publication schedule and we are still working on the
feedback mechanism. We hope to have it in place for the next newsletter.

The annual all hands newsletter is coming together. A first draft will be
available for review sometime this week. I am extremely pleased with the
content we have received to date. The articles are enthusiastic and oriented
to appropriate audiences. I am surprised that so few ExCom members felt that
they had something to say to the member. If you have any last minute
inspirations, please contact Bill LaBelle directly to see if there is still
room. We may have to edit to fit, but I doubt that we will have to turn
anyone away if you act tonight.

2. We have not developed a tracking mechanism for press releases yet,
however Dave Bower continues to work to publicize our region activities.

3. Our sub-committee working clean up of the Region 3 web site has not
gotten traction to date. We will continue to press this as time permits.

4. Best practices for electronic communications has gathered some comments
and thoughts, but the bulk of the product awaits a few hours of free time
from key players.

5. We participated in beta testing of a number of the IEEE collaborative
tools. We believe some of the challenges we identified were well received by
staff, however financial and organization stresses within the staff have
prevented wide spread implementation of new collaborative tools.

6. Our goal of providing a practical for voice conferencing has been met. We
are still working on fine tuning supporting procedures, but the basics are
all there. Next years challenge has been already identified by Director
Elect Stogner. He is looking for video conferencing capabilities. We will
start working on this once he has provided some requirements.

7. We have begun to look at member engagement tools. We have discussed broad
requirements and have looked a number of potential capabilities. We expect
this will be fully engaged early next year.

8 As mentioned above, the IEEE has experienced delays in deploying their
next generation of online tools. However, the volunteer tools program,
vTools for short, has moved forward fueled primarily by the volunteer
community.

Information on the vTools program can be found at vtools.ieee.org. The
vTools.Meetings is the most mature and is ready for your use right now.
Terry Kurtz has implemented this tool already as part of the beta testing
program and feels most web masters should be able to implement it using the
available documentation. Please consider trying it and if you experience
problems let us know. We will work with the vTools team to straighten them
out. In the end, you will have a more current web site with less work. If
you are interested, simply contact the vTools team using the contact
information on the vTools web site.

9. We have not achieved our goal of identifying vice chairs for each
sub-committee. This effort will be continued next year.

We had a very aggressive set of goals. While we didn't get that far through
that list, I am proud of the work we accomplished and want to thank all the
committee members for their efforts that got us this far along the the path
to success. Anyone who would like to help us finish the unfinished tasks
above is welcome to join our efforts with either synchronous or asynchronous
participation in our meetings.

Our meetings are recorded and available to all interested parties within a
few days of the meeting. Our agendas and work products are available at
tinyurl.com/dxaha. If you would like to participate, drop me a line and I
will add you to our mail list.

Bill Clayton
w.clayton @ ieee.org
Communications Chair