Editor's Turn

("Tell me, Gramps, about when you read ink on paper and flew everywhere to meetings")

What would your CPMT Society cost to operate if volunteers were paid engineering wages? One intent of this gedanken experiment is to determine how to apply improved communication technology to our current activities in the most "cost effective" way … how to give members the most benefits for their volunteer time. Assumptions: $30 per hour with no facility or benefits overhead. $1000 for each airline trip involving hotels. Justification of assumptions: On rare occasions even the most modest engineer will brag about earning more than $100/hour but since there need be no loading or taxes on this virtual salary and we live in a world with many engineers willing to compete for jobs the $30 is reasonable. Notice for most volunteers today their companies, universities, or family supply their facilities and benefits. We all brag about the $200 trip but adding airline tickets, hotel bills, meals, car rentals, and salary enroute the $1000 estimate is probably closer to the volunteer average.

Now that we have the rules, let's look at three periodic activities driven by our members comparing today's virtual costs with possible future technology induced savings. Remember, we do not have to follow the dollars like rats following the Piper of Hamelin, but if CPMT does not, probably some other engineering associations will eventually work out the future for us.

1. Putting out an issue of the Newsletter
Volunteer Labor: 25 reporters submitting articles using 2 hours each, one editor cutting and pasting for 30 hours = $2400
Travel: no one travels just for newsletter tasks but combines with conferences and meetings = $0
Photo Supplies and amortized software license for layout = $200
Posting on Internet = $0 (currently free server use at IEEE)
Printing and mailing to 3500 members = $3500 (particularly high cost of mailing out of USA)

Lesson: Volunteers provide at most about 40% of the market costs of the Newsletter. The biggest efficiency gain will occur as technical and cultural improvements allow the internet version of the Newsletter to predominate without need of paper publishing and distribution. It may be necessary to password protect part of the Newsletter for members only to keep an advantage to being a volunteer in CPMT. A small savings will also grow as more reporters run around with digital cameras saving on film and chemical development.

2. Holding a Board of Governors Meeting
Two or three times a year 35 of your most active volunteers meet in one large room and spend the whole day reviewing Society operational proposals and details so that the many hundreds of other volunteers can do their tasks in a directed unhindered way. To impact volunteers careers minimally these meetings are typically on Saturday or Sunday.
Labor: 35 members for 10 grueling meeting hours + 4 hours preparation = $14,700
Travel: $35,000
Meeting room expenses: $1000

Lesson: Labor is about 30% of this activity and recent advances pushed by VP Anthony Chan have resulted in reduced preparation time by centralizing all participants documents on a website two weeks before the meeting. Thus travel is clearly the big pole in the tent. For the past 10 years one or two members call in to the meeting and doggedly listen to the speaker phone and truly participate. However, this calls for a type of concentration not normal in volunteers. Hotels are the normal site for Board meetings. Unfortunately, to date they do not support the high bandwidth Internet needed for interactive video Board meetings. However, in ten years one can imagine the 35 members sitting in their home (in their pajamas) looking at a 50 cm flat display with 34 tiled windows with live video of each of the participants (only video head shots so the childish superhero pictures on their pajamas will not be seen by others). There should be little cultural resistance to this virtual meeting because most of these active volunteers meet with others regularly face-to-face and will thus be sensitive to the full meaning of each others statements. In addition, the meeting chair could more easily enforce one person speaking at a time and streaming text computer translation could occur on the screen (for example, when those volunteers from Boston speak and the rest of us wonder what they mean by the word "poahrts"). Many Board members may still come to a meeting room when it is coordinated with a big event such as ECTC, but many others will be able to participate by video. It is possible that many more than 35 will simply watch part of the meetings as passive observers (although this is hard to imagine since the meetings, however important, are only as exciting as CSPAN cable network).

3. Holding the ECTC, our Society premiere conference
Labor: 350 authors x 100 hours of preparation and presentation = $1, 050, 000
100 session and conference chairs x 24 hours = $72,000
Travel: 450 volunteer contributors = $450,000
Meeting room expenses (hidden as higher room costs) = $100,000
Paid labor, marketing, and supplies: $200,000

Lesson: Let's hear it for the volunteers! As engineers, if we work 100 hours perfecting our data and presentation we want to go to Las Vegas or Disney World for a few days. No virtual ECTC for the speakers. We really don't want to stay home (even in our pajamas) and watch a screen with 1000 windows of other participants. On the other hand, if my schedule or my boss's schedule does not let me go to ECTC, how great it would be to have a website where I can down load a video of any of the presentations (particularly the keynote, plenary, and luncheon).

Would an archival video version of ECTC decrease attendance? Maybe in a very bad economy, but the benefit of chance meetings of new contributors, spontaneous conversations with old friends and contacts, and the excitement of the location will always attract about 10% of our members and many non-members to the conference. However, our Society does sponsor many meetings or workshops that have only 50 participants drawn from across the world. These smaller, but still international, gatherings may develop a culture of virtual real time participation during the next 10 years, but not the large conferences.

Volunteers provide much value to all Society members and to the engineering community. New communication technology and culture will make volunteer communication ever more "cost" effective for publications and small meetings during this decade. None-the-less we will be shaking hands and poking jest with each other at ECTC for decades to come.