We plan to explore these issues in more detail over the coming months by surveying our members directly to find out *who* they are and *what* their needs are. As always, Milan is right on the ball there!

@Donna: We at the France Chapter have also been looking into possible webinar solutions. The simply answer to your question 1) is “not as much as you might think”. It generally depends on the number of participants in your meeting, but you can get away with paying as little as $30-50 for a month’s subscription to a fully-featured webinar service. A monthly subscription means you can potentially hold as many webinars in a month as you like at no extra cost, and you can always cancel your subscription if you’re not planning any webinars in a particular month.

Here are a few solutions which I like the look of (though we haven’t tried any of them ourselves yet.)

Convenos:
http://www.convenos.com/index.html

Yugma:
https://www.yugma.com/

GoTo Meeting:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/

GoTo Webinar:
https://www2.gotowebinar.com/

Additional hidden or disguised audio conferencing charges seem to be the big “gotcha” with these services, so watch out for that, though some of these solutions have built-in audio via VoIP. The important thing is to try out a few of the services with a small group of volunteers before attempting to organize your first real webinar.

I’d be interested to hear if you make any progress on this front. Hopefully we’ll manage to try this out in the coming year also. I’m sure there must be many other chapters who have held successful webinars, so you might want to try searching the STC member forum for more tips and tricks… HTH

I would like us to further pursue two options that have been discussed:

1) Webinars – what does it cost/take to get this arranged for at least one meeting next year?

2) Joint ventures with other organizations with a presence in CT such as AMWA and with other nearby chapters or SIG – can we arrange a meeting before summer with local reps of such groups to discuss one jointly sponsored event next year?

And the larger question: do we have chapter members willing to pursue these alternatives?

Making the chapter more relevant depends on who you want to be relevant to, and what sorts of things they find relevant — so, who and what?

Increasing membership may simply not be in the cards for you. Is there really nothing that you can do with a small group?

I do think we need to define our body of knowledge to include work across the sciences, techology, and engineersing for technical and lay audiences — and, across many industires and disciplines. Furthemore, it seems to me unfortunate if our enthusiasm for our profession lags just as we gain visibility.

I believe our employers and clients are beginning to understand how valuable we can be to their programs and projects beyond our traditional role of editor/writer.

After all, we have unique talents, skills, sense of humon, abilities to innovate, and experience to lead efforts to communicate technical and scientific information of all types to our targeted audiences. We are exceptional communication project, program, and team managers. We know how to cooridnate and facilitate team collaboration. And, we know how to research and apply new information to assure that our products are accurate and complete.

And, we see the humor in the ironic — and, know how to meet deadlines — declaring our work “good enough” if necessary.