Your Board of Governors Ignores Distractions

It was Memorial Day at Disney World. Everyone in the hotel was going to the theme parks. Everyone except the 35 Society volunteers who found a room without windows and held a Board of Governors meeting.

1. Working Board of Governor's meeting on Memorial Day. Shown are a few of the 35 hard working volunteers.

2. Board meeting luncheon. Here is an an excellent opportunity to find out how other companies are doing, to verify your ideas of where technology is heading, and to establish strong professional networks (from left): Johan Liu, Anthony Chan, ron Gedney, Merrill Palmer, Peter Slota, Jim Steele.

3. Craig Gaw, Chair of Wireless TC during Board break.

4. Lunch table brainstorming (from left) Kanji Atsuka, Ralph Russell, Phil Garrou, Jan Vardaman, Craig Gaw, Ralph Wyndrum, Rao Tummala, James Morris

The meeting started with a boisterous discussion on the economic plight of the central IEEE organization. Because of decisions in the distribution of the library payments for IEEE publication made almost 10 years ago, the income to Headquarters has dried up and the Societies are now rich. However, despite this history, everyone had a great time lecturing on the virtues of thrift for headquarters and conspicuous consumption by the newly rich Society. The bottom line is that our Society will transfer about $600K to Headquarters so they can get rid of their red ink. In addition all future budgets will be balanced at the Institute level and will show a surplus at the Society. Every service a Society or member uses will be paid for directly so that deficits will not sneak up on any part of the organization. Part of the confusion comes from the many new services (IEEExplore, web conference and newsletter sites, job postings...) which are just beginning to develop users.

Ralph Wyndrum, IEEE Director of Division I, explained the new direction of IEEE and how it will effect CPMT. For one they are targeting new technology trends more aggressively than in the past. A number of the new technologies directly impact CPMT. Of most immediate interest is the concentration of Microsystems (System on chip, System on Package). There is no desire to start a new Society or Council, IEEE already has too many. But there is an opportunity for several societies to back a TC or a Transaction and lead the parade.

Anthony Chan, Administrative Vice President, pointed out that there were 9 billion web pages today with 7 million new ones by the end of the day. So any particular CPMT web page is not going to be found by chance but only by systematic linking. He suggested using the standard XML and is looking for a web master who wants to soar.

George Harman, Chair Fellows Committee, said that this year CPMT did submit the appropriate number of nominations to Fellow of the Institute after looking like only 3 would be submitted a week before deadline. There was some discussion of having a search committee be active earlier this year. He predicted that of those submitted through our Society about 3-5 will make the cut this year. There will also be about 3 others that are in our Society but are submitted through other Societies. (Editor note: any member active for a number of years in CPMT, an educator, or application engineer should convince a colleague to help assemble a nomination package. Don't wait to be tapped on the shoulder.)

C. P. Wong reported that about 500 attended the Surface Mount Conference in Nuremberg Germany from April 23 - 26.

Phil Garrou reviewed the Technical Committee that have lost vital signs. TC-6 on high end PWBs has lost all active members to other IEEE activities or to economically challenged job positions. There will be one more attempt to revive it and then it will be sidelined for a while. The MEMs and Sensor Packaging group, TC-17 has no chair do to the frenzy in these fields. TC-20 Bio-Electronics Packaging has proved to be a market place of very competitive companies that do not want to share anything on the pre-competitive or professional level (at least at this time).

Paul Wesling, VP of Publications, described the initial success with tracking Transaction articles in the review process in new software, Manuscript Central. This was the most visible step in our attempt to remain the "publisher of choice" to active members of our profession. Paul wants to expand our publications to include audio lectures, simulations, and tutorials and not just "papers". For example, CPMT owns software that can turn a power point presentation into a web streaming audio synchronized with paging view graphs. He sees the publication job stopping when brief introduction lectures are available to our members on most of our subjects. For digging deeper into the material members will need the services of our Education group or use IEEExplore to find the original papers of interest.
He described the difficulty of getting the web version of the Transactions in color. He also described the tension between providing publications in paper, CD-ROM, or on the web. For example, CPMT has a CD set that has all the transaction in it and it is beginning to sell. We may want to add the last year of Transactions and an updated index to it and sell it to the media wise members. He noted that all conference proceedings were going to CD-ROM and CPMT is keeping them in the Book Broker program so that people who missed the conference can still get a copy.
Koji Nihei, Member at Large from Waseda University, gave the Japan Chapter report to the Board. Koji indicated that the formerly named IEMT/IMC Symposium has become the ICEP - International Conference on Electronics Packaging. It will meet April 17 - 19 in 2002 in the Tokyo R yutsu Center. This year's technical meeting with 96 papers attracted 330 people and the 70 exhibits attracted 13,000 visitors.
Al Puttlitz, Education Vice President, was glowing with the imminent success of the 13 short courses ready for the next day. The thirteen courses were attracting about 400 students. All time popular courses were being professionally converted to CD-ROM courses by IEEE media department instead of the originally intended web course. Market tests had indicated members preferred the CD-ROMs to on-line courses. The input materials supplied by the instructor were about the same.
Rao Tummala, CPMT President and Chair of education sessions at ECTC, discussed the curriculum development that had occurred from 1997 through last year. Our society had invested $120K to the $120K of PRC Georgia Tech plus the $120K NSF. Although this total is small compared to the money used to develop multimedia courses by international companies, quit a bit of progress has been made. A number of good teaching modules are already available: Sensors and a PWB virtual fab lab from T. U. Budapest by Ilayfalvi-Vilez and Peter Gordon, Thin Film virtual lab from Gary May of GIT, Signal Integrity by Jose Schutt-Aine at University of Illinois, and Electronic Packaging Modeling and Simulation by Dr. Bruce Kim from ASU. These modules seem to be an unintended best kept secret. But any member can go to [www.cpmt.org] and click on [education] in the list on the left...and there is a list of modules completed to date. Everyone agreed to encourage completion of existing coursework, transfer of completed work to CD-ROM, and lighting a fire under existing members to start using them on the habit of continued education.
Kanji Otsuka presented a long list of suggestions to improving the interaction between the 10,000 Japanese engineers that should be active in CPMT and our organization. Examples included a Japanese column on the CPMT web site, an introduction in Japanese to conference papers, and more discussion of Japanese component and packaging activities within CPMT publications. One big shift is the technology center has shifted from the large companies to the Japanese Universities and National Labs. CPMT used to have support in the large companies but this means little now.
John Segelken, Chair Nominations, mentioned that the BOG reelection process is starting. (see article elsewhere in Newsletter).
Bill Brown, Chair Student Chapters, announced that the Georgia Tech and Romanian student chapters have been approved. The China and University of Arkansas were undergoing the approval process. Student Sharath Mekala gave a brief description of how the student chapter at Georgia Tech helped with the education process.
Ralph Russell, Membership Chair, discussed how the membership in CPMT gained 7.4% in one year (May to May, 3385 --> 3637). This makes CPMT the 3rd fastest growing Society. Other Societies offer free membership or lifetime membership as techniques to drive their numbers higher. The approach long used by your Society is to provide more and more membership opportunities so most renew their membership and tell their colleagues to join. The number of casual members is not as important as the number of CPMT active and networked members.
There are now 35 Chapter for CPMT. Most of these chapters are outside of North America indicating an active global organization. There are strong possibilities of new chapters opening in Shanghai, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, and Israel.
Connie Swager, Marketing Director, reported on what her Marketing Committee had determined with the professional Potomac Communications Group. A large percentage of CPMT's discretionary budget will be used in these efforts over the next 18 months. Several examples of initiatives include: getting CPMT publicity in the many magazines component/packaging/manufacturing engineers read, having a short and long list of member benefits including more chances to network with other volunteers, more visibility to awards given by CPMT, more communication with the 10,000 potential members that only flirt with IEEE.