Minutes: UGCIS Board of Directors Meeting
Friday, June 20, 2003
Asilomar, California
Present: Carolyn Merry, John Shular, Scott Mackay, Mary Lou Larson, Shashi Shekhar, Zorica Nedovic-Budic, Lyna Wiggins, Dawn Wright, John Wilson, Lynn Usery, Art Getis, Sean Ahearn, Suzy Jampoler, Jochen Albrecht, May Yuan.
1) Call to order. The meeting was called to order by Merry, UCGIS President, at 9am to continue the strategic planning exercise held Monday June 16, 2003.
2) Memberships.
a. Mary-Lou Larson summarized discussions on federal membership obligation; annual due will be $10,000 plus $40,000 for sponsored activities, which can be for workshops, internships, etc. USGS scientific review board may review their UCGIS membership and perhaps sponsor a postdoc fellowship. Besides USGS, NIMA and Census Bureau may be potential federal members. NIMA expressed interest but is still at preliminary stage. Jochen Albrecht indicated that Census Bureau is likely to submit their application two years from now. Carolyn Merry suggested we contact BTS for federal membership to UCGIS. Mary-Lou Larson agreed to compile a list of potential federal members.
b. More efforts should be directed to recruit foreign affiliates. Lynn Usery reminded that foreign affiliates enjoy all UCGIS benefits except that they are not voting members.
3) Communication issues.
a. Dawn Wright: Is our listserv still functional?
b. Suzy Jampoler: The master database is very close to working. Various mailing lists can be generated from the master database. Four mailing lists were identified: ucgis-all list, all delegates list, lead delegates list, and board list. Only messages to the ucgis-all list will be filtered. Other lists, all members are able to distribute messages. Suzy will work with Dick to see if we can set spam filters to all listservs.
c. Non-member organizations need to pay a fee to post job or meeting announcements at UCGIS website. The rate is $100 per announcement. A payment page will be set up. Non-member organizations will be able to pay at the payment page, enter starting and ending dates for the announcement (maximum posting period: 6 months), and post announcements.
d. Resume posting services to allow students or personnel from member institutions posting resumes in PDF formats to the UCGIS website. A list of under-represented student groups will be provided. Education Committee will work with Dick Campbell to develop resume services at the UCGIS website.
e. John Wilson suggested the board improve contacts to lead delegates, perhaps calling lead delegates every 6 months. Via these calls, the board will speak and listen to lead delegates and communicate member activities and concerns back to the board. The following three key issues should be addressed in a call to lead delegates:
i. Starting with a positive note on the progress of UCGIS activities, including current and upcoming events (such as grant opportunities, student paper competitions, workshops, nominations for researcher or educator of the year awards, etc). Check the last student paper competition, congratulate the lead delegate if the winner is from the institution. Thanks for any students from the institution who participated in the student paper competition. If no participation, encourage future participation.
ii. Check out the member’s website before the call. If the website needs revisions, suggest an update. During the call, find out the followings. What is going on at the member institution? Who else is doing GIScience-related work? Any new hires in GIScience? What and how UCGIS related activities are organized (e.g business meetings twice a year, seminars, meetings in response to UCGIS calls, such as research themes, etc). Get a sense if there may be a change in delegation leadership (e.g. the lead delegate may move to another institution or the lead delegate does not wish to continue). If so, find out who may take the leadership or possible contact persons on campus.
iii. Membership dues. Find out if the organization has paid the due before the call. If yes, thank the delegate, but if not, kindly remind the delegate and ask why.
f. Findings from the calls should be synthesized and compiled in UCGIS Newsletter. Grants and new hires will also be posted in the news page at UCGIS website.
g. UCGIS should publish Newsletters twice a year before the summer and winter meetings. Send email notices to members when a new issue of Newsletter is available at the UCGIS website.
h. Action plans on Communication:
i. Carolyn Merry and Mary-Lou Larson will assign each board member three member institutions to call.
ii. Suzy Jampoler will work with Dick Campbell to complete UCGIS website revisions.
iii. Suzy Jampoler will synthesize findings from calls to member institutions and compile a report to be published in the Newsletter.
iv. Lyna Wiggins will work on student resume services at the UCGIS website.
v. Communication Committee will compile and publish Newsletters twice per year and send notices to members new research opportunities, events, and activities.
vi. Suzy Jampoler recommended the UCGIS acquire professional assistance on communication and event planning. There are 7 UCGIS workshops and meetings on schedule in the next 12 months. Additional UCGIS workshops are upcoming in association with SPACE program. Cost to the professional assistance will be covered by overhead charges (15%) to these workshops.
i. The main functions of Communication Committee will be coordinating with Membership Committee to (1) communicate with UCGIS members and individuals in member institutions, and (2) communicate with people and organizations outside UCGIS. Newsletters will be a key component of the communication. Communication Committee should coordinate with other committees to determine topics, sections, and articles to be included in UCGIS Newsletters.
j. Long-term goal of communication: Improve communication with UCGIS members and people outside UCGIS.
k. Action plan for long-term goal of communication.
i. Compile a one-page summary of annual executive report (annual UCGIS highlights) for general audience in conjunction with annual strategic planning. The one-page summary can be sent to administration at member institutions and to legislators.
ii. How to keep reaching out to foreign organizations:
1. Provide travel support for the president to attend annual meetings of foreign equivalents, such as AGILE, GEOID, and Japan GIS.
2. Send annual highlights to foreign equivalents. Should include pictures of foreign participants in the highlights. Pictures of UCGIS events should be posted at UCGIS website.
4) Mega issues.
a. Financial health: Membership dues are the main source of UCGIS income. Shall we keep recruiting more members or have we reached our capacity? Lynn Usery outlined UCGIS base income and expenses:
i. Income: membership dues: $70,000 (70 regular members); $20,000 (2 federal members); overheads for grants and workshops will be used for management, so there is no net income.
ii. Expenses: Activities: $30,000 (summer assembly); $9,000 (winter meeting). Staff and consulting: $60,000.
iii. Estimated income and expenses are about balanced. However, expenses are likely to go up over time, but there has been great resistance to due increases.
iv. Potential strategies to raise revenue:
1. Add individual memberships at $120 annually for example. Work with GISc journal publishers to explore the possibility if part of the individual membership due ($70, for example) will be for journal subscription and the rest goes to UCGIS. Individual members will in fact receive the journals at a much lower rate than regular individual subscriptions. Publishers will gain additional subscriptions to the journals.
2. Raise membership fees to $3000 per year, among which $2,000 will be used to support the lead delegate to UCGIS meetings. If no lead delegates attend UCGIS meeting in a given year, the travel support will go to UCGIS general funds. The strategy can also increase the attendance at UCGIS meetings.
3. Encourage federal agencies to sponsor UCGIS internships. This will offer member institutions internship training for students, federal agencies quality student force, and UCGIS revenue via overheads.
4. Consider UCGIS applied GISc conferences (held in odd years) alternating with GIScience conferences (held in even years). Organize the conference so that it can generate some revenue for UCGIS.
5. Approach NSF to provide travel support for students to attend UCGIS meetings or workshops. In the past, NSF made similar arrangements with other organizations.
b. Leadership to the society.
i. Keith Clarke’s recent article in ACSM indicated a shortage of GISc professionals in the next 10 years. UCGIS should provide leadership to establish strategies for GISc workforce development.
ii. UCGIS should provide leadership to set GISc research agenda. Currently, vendors seem over influential on GISc research agenda. UCGIS should work with OGC to promote Open GIS software platform and with federal governments to address large GIS issues, such as one-stop geospatial portal initiatives.
iii. UCGIS should provide leadership in search for GISc laws using Michael Goodchild’s plenary talk on Fundamental Laws of GISc on June 19, 2003. Consider forums in the next UCGIS summer assembly to discuss GISc laws. Identify what we do substantively and publish related essays in broadly distributed journals, such as Science, Nature, and National Geographic Magazine. In addition, establish forums for communication with other disciplines.
c. Strengthen ties to related international organizations and keep up with what they are doing.
d. Ethics in GISc. Will Craig in charge.
e. Accreditation of GISc programs. Libby Wentz is doing a survey on GIS programs in member institutions.
5) Other Business
a. Carolyn Merry moved to accept the minutes of the board meeting on June 16, 2003. Art Getis seconded. Motion passed.
b. Shashi Shekhar reminded the suggestion of establishing UCGIS fellows (similar to IEEE fellows) sponsored by federal members. Carolyn Merry charged Research Committee to formulate a plan.
c. Art Getis: UCGIS needs to determine what workshops to be offered and how to get participants for the workshops in SPACE program. The program aims to sensitize university faculty to spatial phenomena by engaging social scientists as part of the teaching team. Expanding upon the CSISS experience, SPACE program has a strong emphasis on training faculty. In the program, UCGIS is responsible to organize a 2-week workshop per year. Need to identify a way that members from all UCGIS institutions have fair opportunities to participate.
d. Carolyn Merry: charge SPACE organization and administration to non-sponsored research project committee. Recommend Benjamin Zhang (Southwest Texas State University) chair the committee. Carolyn Merry will ask Ben Zhang to provide four nominations to serve on the committee and seek the board’s approval.
e. John Shular: The focus of the next winter meeting will be on homeland security. John Shular and Sean Ahearn will organize the meeting and coordinate the meeting with other homeland security efforts in federal governments. The meeting is tentatively scheduled on February 5 and 6. Suzy Jampoler will check availability of meeting facility. On Thursday February 5, we will have briefings from UCGIS researchers (morning) and federal governments (afternoon) on homeland security issues. All presentations should be short (15 minutes) and focused. On Friday February 6, we will have the council meeting followed by the board meeting. Identify a congressional sponsor and target congressional representatives who have gate-keeping responsibility to oversee budgets related to homeland security and GIS. John Shular and Sean Ahearn will develop and distribute a detail program soon.
f. John Wilson: The next summer assembly will be rolled into the GIScience conference. Three elements have been identified in the research committee meeting on June 16 to be standard components of UCGIS summer meetings: (1) research briefs and discussions on emerging themes; (2) workshops or tutorials on more or less established research themes; and (3) student paper competition. Research briefs can be submitted anytime to the research committee, but the research committee will review research briefs quarterly. Research briefs approved by the research committee will be posted at UCGIS website for two years and then be archived. The research committee will solicit three presentations on each selected research brief to be included in summer meetings. Round-table discussions will be organized to follow presentations on selected research briefs.
g. Suzy Jampoler will work with Jochen Albrecht to check if University of Maryland will host council and board meetings before or after GIScience meeting next year. Univ of Maryland is preferred because of its proximity to the Baltimore Airport.
h. Potential sites for 2005 summer assembly include Chicago and Big Sky, Wyoming. John Shular will check if University of Illinois is willing to host the assembly. Mary Lou Larson to evaluate Big Sky. If either place does not work out, Suzy Jampoler will send out a RFP to all delegates.
i. Lynn Usery briefed the status of the book on the 10 plus 4 UCGIS research themes. All white papers are available for the research themes except for one. Taylor & Francis has agreed to publish the book. Authors have been contacted to provide a quick update on their chapters. The target date for submitting all manuscripts to the publisher is September 1, 2003. In addition to the 13 chapters on research themes, Bob McMaster and Lynn Usery will add an introductory chapter, David Mark has agreed to write a conclusion chapter, and Lynn and Bob will contact Michael Goodchild about writing a preface for the book.
j. Art Getis: The American Statistical Association (ASA) invited UCGIS to submit a proposal on visualization to compete for a session in their next annual meeting in Toronto. Last year, UCGIS submitted a winning proposal. However, the session was scheduled in the end of the ASA meeting and the attendance was poor. Art Getis wrote a letter to ASA after the meeting. ASA responded apologetically and indicated that a better time slot would be allocated for further sessions. Art Getis will update the last proposal and submit to ASA.
k. Jochen Albrecht is the new chair of Nomination Committee. Art Getis (the immediate past president) is the vice chair. After discussions, the nominees of Nomination Committee include Greg Elmes, Scott Mackay, Mary Lou Larson, and John Shular. John Wilson moved to approve the nominations. Sean Ahearn seconded. Motion passed.
l. Suzy Jampoler will submit a budget to the board in the next couple of weeks for approval. The budget will include a part-time staff to assist on project planning. Estimated budget for the staff is about $15,000 per year.
m. Members for Strategy Planning Committee were discussed. Lynn Usery (the president elect) will chair the meeting. Nominations include Sean Ahearn (1st year board member), Shashi Shekhar (2nd year board member) and Dawn Wright (3rd board member). John Schular was nominated for the vice chair position. Art Getis moved to accept the nominations. Lynn Usery seconded. Motion passed with one abstained (Art Getis who is the immediate past president and felt not appropriate for him to vote on this).
n. Art Getis reminded the board that UCGIS is a sponsor of Vespucci Institute July 28 to August 9. Participation to the institute is by invitation only. We need to inform students in our member institutes to apply for attending future Vespicci workshops. Suzy Jampoler asked ESRI and Integraph to provide travel support for students to go to the workshop. ESRI declined. Integraph has not yet responded.
o. Lynn Usery: UCGIS should support activities like Vespucci and play into international mega issues. UCGIS should encourage students to apply and seek funding to sponsor students’ participations in similar international workshops.
6) Adjourn. John Wilson moved to adjourn. Lynn Usery seconded. Motion passed. The meeting adjourned at 11:56am.