CPMT on WWW: Ink is Fading
Do you like the feel of the glossy paper and the smell of the ink on this copy of the CPMT Newsletter? If you have read this far and haven’t thrown away this Newsletter with all the credit card and third mortgage offers that you also received today, you are definitely hooked on information that can help your career.
But how will you receive your CPMT information in the future? For more than 20 years the format you have been holding has been standard. However, for the last 2 issues a web version of the Newsletter was available at our Society home page (cpmt.org). This version made it before the slow moving paper got through the mail, particularly for our non-USA members. The web version has color pictures, more current news, and costs only volunteer time. The paper version is only black and white, with printing, administration, and postage costs totaling $1 per copy (x 4000 members). Half of the CPMT annual budget is for publishing and mailing paper to members that for the most part gathers dust and gets lost just before you need an article.
Three years ago only a small percentage of IEEE members were daily users of the Internet / worldwide web. Today most of us don’t like to admit how much we depend on our computers for communication. The web could provide CPMT members with (1) quicker release of publications, (2) color and unlimited text versions of journals and newsletters, (3) audio and viewgraphs of many keynote speeches from CPMT meetings, (4) word searchable archives -- that don’t gather dust in stacks in your back room, (5) forums and chat rooms where you can seek mutual assistance from other members, (6) quick-look glossary of CPMT technology terms, and (7) self-paced tutorials that will bring members up to speed on any topic covered by our Society.
The Newsletter on the web is just the first step to get you used to the water. It is a bit chilling at first. How do you sneak the web newsletter into a boring meeting? How do you clip out a newsletter picture and send it to your mother? How do you get the same feeling of satisfaction of completely reading the Newsletter if you can’t throw it loudly into the trash? We do not yet know all the small habits in our engineering culture that will slow your transition to the telecommunication format for information, but we would like your feedback as the process continues. Technology is drawing us to the Internet/CD-ROM format with low cost portable computers and faster modems. The cost is drawing us to electronic delivery as international postage and printing costs rise; and members are luring us on as they find better ways to thrive with information in an electronic format.
Please let Paul Wesling (p.wesling@ieee.org -- 1 408 285 9555) or Dave Palmer (d.palmer@ieee.org -- 1 505 844 2138) know your vision of future CPMT information handling. Visit this Newsletter on the web, you will never lose it on the coffee table again. -- CPMT Publications Committee