President's Column
President's column
by Mark Haselkorn
With July and the summer finally here, PCS members and friends are turning our eyes towards the sunny skies of Hawaii and the annual International Professional Communication Conference (IPCC). The first IPCC took place in 1957 in New York City. That makes IPCC older than its parent organization, the IEEE, which was founded on January 1, 1963 when the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers merged to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
At its formation, the IEEE had 150,000 members, 140,000 of whom were in the United States. Today, more than 150,000 members come from outside North America and IEEE is the single largest technical professional organization in the world, with societies covering fields from Medicine and Biology to Intelligent Transportation Systems. The Professional Communication Society is one of the smallest, but oldest, of these societies.
At IPCC each year, we take advantage of our small but dynamic membership base to hold an international conference with the best of both worlds—big enough to cover the wide and fascinating issues associated with information and communication in the technical world, yet small enough to be a warm and convivial gathering where attendees meet old friends and greet new ones as they expand our community of active practitioners, researchers and educators.
It was great to see you there and to interacting with you about hot issues in the field like social computing and user-centered design, hot issues in the society like new educational offerings and future initiatives, or just hot social topics like where should we meet, the pool or the beach?
************************
Mark Haselkorn is the current President of IEEE-PCS, and works as Professor and Founding Chair, Department of Technical Communication; Director, Pacific Rim Visualization and Analytics Center; Director, Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief at the University of Washington.