Virtual Environments Technical Group of the HFES
CHAIR'S CORNER| Thanks to the efforts of our
current and future officers and to the strong
support from our membership, our technical group
continues to grow and prosper. Our
membership has grown by 10% (as of the annual
conference there were 230 members, compared with
208 at the end of last year); our savings have
grown by 70%. We have filled our officer
positions for next year and are building a
consistent pipeline for publishing our group's
newsletter. For the next year, I suggest that we focus on increasing membership and services through web-based technology and by eliminating the membership fees to the technical group. At our last technical group meeting (HFES Annual Meeting, Houston, TX – 9/29/99), we discussed the possibility of reducing or eliminating our annual dues, given that we are receiving faster than we are spending. One suggestion was that student membership should be free. Unfortunately, after checking with the central office, I have learned that this would be very difficult to implement since there is no mechanism for a differential TG dues structure for different classes of membership. Adopting this approach would potentially increase the central office's record keeping and accounting costs. If you would like me to pursue this with the executive council, please let me know. It may be more expedient, however, to reduce the membership fees to zero for a few years, until all the funds are used, then reassess this fee structure when (and if) necessary. The Internet Technology Group, for example, has no fees. This allows it to permit potential members to simply join on-line for their technical group's many web-based offerings. Technical group members do not need to be members of HFES to be members of a technical group. Allowing people to join on-line presents an important opportunity to increase our visibility among researchers who are not primarily Human Factors people, but who do relevant and important work with Virtual Environments. As it currently stands, our potential allies may believe they would need to pay $130 to join the society, plus $5 to join the technical group. By accepting that we do not really have any operating costs except lunch at the Annual Meeting, which we could do without, we can create a policy of openly sharing membership with any and all interested individuals. A strong web-based presence that focuses on providing services such as lists of research laboratories, bibliographies of current research topics, and links to other virtual-environment related information sources, would inexpensively provide a potentially valuable service to our current members and attract new members to our group. This would represent a large (and visible) commitment from our webmaster and from you to provide content and ensure quality. We will be rewarded, however, by building ourselves a visible, vocal technical group that promotes excellent research in virtual environments. And now, a bit of business required by our society's by-laws. As of November 10th, our current and future officers are: Geb Thomas (geb-thomas@uiowa.edu),
Technical Group Chair The finances of the technical group, as of the annual conference are:
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the Virtual Environments Technical Group, please do not hesitate to contact me. Stay real. Geb Dr. Geb Thomas |
© 1999 Virtual Environments
Technical Group of the Human Factors and Ergonomics
Society. All rights reserved.
Questions or comments? virtualnomics@grok.ecn.uiowa.edu