Report Guidelines for E-mail Submission

The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines for the electronic submission of meeting reports. This document will be revised periodically to reflect the baseline capabilities of Region 3 Executive Committee (Excom) and Region Committee members' e-mail.

The Report

The report should be present the

The report should be condensed to be the equivalent of one typed page wherever possible.

E-Mail Meeting Reports

Reports are expected from all Region 3 Committee Members at the annual Region meeting held in conjunction with Southeastcon.  To facilitate effective use of limited meeting time, these reports must be electronically distributed to members ahead of the actual meeting. Keep in mind that members will need time before the meeting to read your report. The agenda for the meeting contains a submission deadline which members should conform to so that the Region will have a good meeting.

The electronic version of the agenda will contain links to a web version of your report. The Region 3 Secretary will keep the agenda up-to-date as e-mail reports are submitted.

Paper Meeting Reports

Due to the need to have reports available BEFORE the meeting, paper reports are not accepted.

Special Considerations for Formatting E-mail Reports

Try to condense your report to the equivalent of one text page of information.

Consider the e-mail message (not the header) to be your report. Add a header to the top reflecting your topic. Some folks seem to have mail systems that don't render what you see for the To:/From:/Subject: and thus you are not communicating what you think you are.

Take whatever actions you need to on your mail system to make sure that your e-mail is readable on systems that render your text without adding any "newlines" (carriage returns) that are not in the mail message. (In other words, make sure paragraphs don't end up one long line.)

Don't use tabs in your mail message, they don't work the same on everyone's machine.

If you need to create tables or lists where you have indented lines or any other kind of formatting, be sure to type your message in a fixed width font (like Courier) so that what you align with spaces has a better chance of being aligned when you send it.

Try to avoid attachments wherever possible. Some members' mail systems can't handle attachments at all. Also, not all members have the same tools for reading attachments. Especially avoid attachments for your base report which should be in the body of the e-mail message.

Try to avoid any expectation on where pages breaks appear for folks who decide to print your e-mail. Various things effect this and controlling it is difficult. Probably the "best" system is to use courier, limit your lines to 65-76 characters line, and limit lines per page to 59 lines. It would also be a good idea to announce on the first line of your mail message that you are obeying this convention if it is important that the document print well.

New: If you wish to supply a "formatted" version of your report in PDF (Portable Document Format), please feel free to do so. However, please send it ONLY to the Region 3 Secretary and change the subject of your mail to have "(PDF)" on the end of it or send it as an attachment to your plain text message report sent to the Region 3 Excom alias and the section alias.

Send your report to the following e-mail aliases

OU/Position Alias
Region 3 ExCom r3-excom2011
Region 3 Sections (part of R3 Committee) sec-r03
Region 3 Secretary g.vaughn

All e-mail aliases should have "@ieee.org" appended to them.

Subject Line

Please a e-mail subject line of:

[IEEE R3-MEETING] (title/unit) Report for March 2011 Region 3 Meeting

where you might use something like "Treasurer" or "Savannah Section Chair" for the "(title/unit)" in the above.


Written by David Green (d.green), 1998-2009 Region 3 Secretary
Last Update: 24 January 2011 by Gregg Vaughn