Editor's Turn

There is good news and bad news in the recent strong CPMT Board meeting. The good was obvious as one great report after another jumped out in an efficient manner. The bad news was that about 60% of the attendees also attended Board meetings 20 years ago. In contrast, approximately 30% of all IEEE societies members do not even renew membership each year. However, about 1000 of our CPMT members have belonged for more than 10 years. Yet only about 50 of these long-term members plus 50 rotating new members are making all the directional decisions for the Society (this is an estimate since no one really has the time or money to pin such data down). So, this is an issue of leadership balance and every member can decide for themselves what fraction of the seasoned volunteers are best to mix with the newer volunteers. This member has decided that after 25 years of CPMT Newsletter involvement, it is time to turn the editorial cutting and pasting to another (new) volunteer. Below is a job description so that any of the 3000 CPMT members can rush to apply for this opening.

CPMT Newsletter Editor position:

Tasks

Send out news request to email list of 100 most active volunteers 4 times a year (1 hour/issue)

Attend for each issue either a Board meeting, a Chapter meeting, or a CPMT conference so you take pictures and report first hand on the activities (10 hours)

Receive many emails from volunteers and edit their rushed engineer language into informal English (5 hours). However, this material represents probably 100 hours by our many volunteers (thanks to you all).

Paste this news and photographs into a simple frame based web format (15 hours)

Download this copy to the IEEE website and regularly update for late news (4 hours)

Reformat everything into the "standard" 24 page paper PDF format for the mailed Newsletter (20 hours)

Fight with your computer that can't stand these big files and keeps trying to change all the perfect pages after you add just one little last picture on page 24. (5 hours)

Listen to the almost complete silence after the issue is done (unless you spelled someone's name wrong, used an old telephone number wrong, or gored someone's ox with your cartoon) ( 0 hours)

Rewards

Four times a year you don't have to ask "what will I do in the evenings and over the weekend?"

You get to interact with a lot of great technology leaders -- build a great professional network and feel like Benjamin Franklin must have when he ran a newspaper single handedly.

You feel satisfaction in providing a large part of the glue and communication that helps volunteers accomplish their goals and maximize their impact on the members and the larger profession. In contrast, if we let this job to the many professional Newsletter providers it would quickly become another artistic masterpiece that will be quickly discarded by our already overwhelmed members.

Contact

Now that you are motivated, please contact Paul Wesling, Vice President of CPMT Publications, email: p.wesling@ieee.org, Tel: +1 408 331 0114 with your interest. Thanks.