THINK BEFORE YOU LEAP!
Before you take any drastic action in your personal or business life, you should always, "think before you leap". Consideration should be given to the consequences of your actions. There are now two issues within IEEE that need to be carefully considered before action is taken: optional membership in IEEE-USA and entity position approval.
IEEE-USA is one of the six major IEEE boards along with Educational Activities, Publications, Regional Activities, Standards and Technical Activities. The vision of IEEE-USA is to serve the 234,000 IEEE-USA members by being the technical professional's best resource for achieving life long career vitality and by providing an effective voice on policies that promote U.S. prosperity. TAB, the Technical Activities Board, recently formed a group to investigate methods of streamlining IEEE activities. Two of the recommendations of this streamlining group would make membership in IEEE-USA optional and require additional approval for entity position statements.
For members in the USA, IEEE Regions 1 – 6, the annual membership dues are $113.00. Twenty-seven of these dollars are an assessment that goes to the IEEE-USA. If membership in IEEE-USA were optional, would you be a member? Many of our CPMT Society members would probably elect not to be a member of IEEE-USA. This is where you need to "think before you leap". IEEE-USA works to bolster the professional standing and careers of U.S. engineers. Do you want this extra assistance with your career? At the November 1999 TAB Board Meeting, a simple majority of the TAB voted to pass a motion to make membership into the IEEE-USA optional for all members of IEEE. Currently TAB plans to make a motion at the February 2000 Board of Directors meeting to make membership in the IEEE-USA optional and open to anyone in the world.
Another issue addressed by the streamlining committee was approval of entity position statements, primarily those made by the IEEE-USA. TAB is in disagreement with some of the position statements that have been made. These position statements are used to inform US legislators and government officials about issues important to IEEE-USA members. In this political process, timing is very important. Additional layers of approval would hamper this effort if every other IEEE entity, such as TAB, had to approve each position statement before it was issued. At the November 1999 TAB Board meeting, the motion on entity approval of entity positions was tabled and sent back for further study. It will probably come up again at the next TAB Board meeting in February 2000.
We need to give careful consideration before taking action on these two issues, "think before you leap". Please give me your opinions on these two important issues and I will pass them along.
Ralph W. Russell, II
r.w.russell@ieee.org
One possible qualifier to positions: "this is the considered judgment of a group of U.S. IEEE members with expertise in the subject field. The United States Activities Board promotes the career and technology policy interests of the 240,000 electrical, electronics, and computer engineers who are U.S. members of the IEEE."