President’s Message

by Joseph Humbert
EBSTC President

Welcome, members of the East Bay chapter of STC. I'm Joe Humbert, your President for the upcoming year. For those new to the chapter, for
the past three years, I have helped to keep the chapter’s website up to
date and have been the treasurer. You can see my background at Your New EBSTC Leaders.

First of all, we want to thank Linda Shaltz for leading the chapter last
year. She was instrumental in pushing our College Connection forward.
We are now in a position to visit local college campuses to help steer writing students into technical communication. Linda also wanted us
to think outside of the box. To that end, we had a mid-day field trip to
the Lawrence Livermore Lab, a free Holiday dinner in December,
and a free ice cream social. See photos of the ice cream social at
Ice Cream Social Photos. We hope to repeat this in September, on a Saturday afternoon at a park in the San Ramon-Danville area. Again,
thank you, Linda, for your leadership.

The College Connection has ambitious plans that may take a year or
two to reach full fruition. But the rewards will be huge. We will invite students to our meetings for little cost to the student, encourage students
to write articles for our newsletter, perhaps set up a mentoring program between you, our members, and the students, sponsor technical writing contests, maybe even set up a scholarship fund. Contact Gwaltney Mountford if you want to help bring this valuable program about.

We welcome Dave Eicher, our newsletter editor. With his guidance,
we have our newsletter up and running again. If you have any articles
to contribute, not only on technical writing, but even poems or short
stories, contact Dave.

We will also set up a Yahoogroups discussion board. We encourage
all members to participate. So often, we don’t hear from the majority of
our members. We would like to know what your thoughts are on the
various issues, programs, and events surrounding this chapter. Maybe
we are not filling a need. We would like to know and here is a forum for
you to speak. To sign up, go to EBSTC Yahoo groups.

Another exciting development this year is that we want to podcast as
many of our speaker programs that we can. We know that many
members simply cannot come to the meetings but would have liked
to hear the program. We will try to make this an East Bay members
only feature. You will get a username and password to download audio
files to your computer or iPod. And if available, you can also download
the PDF file of the PowerPoint presentation of the program to follow
along. Still come to the meeting. After all, you can’t ask a podcast a question or to clarify a point. To see how this will work, we have posted
a mini-version of this message. Go to EBSTC podcasts.

I welcome our new leadership for the year:

• First of all, Helen Cheung, our V.P. of Programs last year, is now
our President-Elect.
• Gwaltney Mountford, who heads the College Connection, will be pulling double duty as our Treasurer this year.
• New this year is our V.P. of Programs, Lis Fraser. She will set up
this year’s speaker programs.
• Jeanie Egbert has graciously stayed on as V.P. of Arrangements.
She will notify you of our meetings and special events.
• New this year is our Resume Counselor, Joy Montgomery. She literally wrote the book, Hand It to 'em on a Platter. Come to the meetings when
Joy is here and she can help you with your resume.
• Also new this year, Patrick Lufkin and Richard Mateosian have joined
Joy Montgomery on the Kenneth Gordon Scholarship Committee to recognize and reward up and coming technical writing students.
• We also want to thank those who have stayed on from last year: June Shaefer, archivist, Sue Phelan, chapter photographer, T.R. Girill, College Connection and Community Outreach, Sherry Smith, database manager, Ken Evans, jobs manager, Melody Brumis and Ashwini Tharval, publicists, and members of the College Connection: Janet Gray, Patrick Lufkin, May McKoon, Joy Montgomery, and Rosalind Rogoff. Finally, I will stay on as webweaver.

I feel like I have an excellent team here to make this a very exciting and successful year. See who we are at Your New EBSTC Leaders, or the new Who We Are page (at //www.ebstc.org/who-we-are.html).

However, we do need a couple of positions to be filled, most notably a Secretary, who is also a voting member, and Hospitality.
• The Secretary takes notes during Council Meetings and writes up
minutes (we only have about three or four Council meetings a year). A
good job for a new member.
• Hospitality updates member name tags and brings them into the
meetings plus sets up and runs the door prize raffle at the end of our meetings. Also a good job for a new member.
• Nominating Committee to seek out voting members of the leadership
team for the following year. Must be with the chapter for two years, have attended most of the meetings, and must be a good judge of character..
• Dave, our newsletter editor, could use a web designer.

These assignments are designed not to take up much of your time. Any takers? See our Volunteers page at http://www.ebstc.org/volunteers.html
for other ways to contribute to the chapter.

We are also working on having a beginning FrameMaker workshop on a Saturday for those who need to refresh.

Finally, while we consistently see about a dozen people at the meetings, we challenge all of you to attend at least one meeting this coming year. We would love to meet you. Plus, at a meeting you can talk with your fellow writers, interact with our speakers, have a great dinner with a fancy dessert, get your resume redone, and maybe even find a job. You won’t regret it. If you have a question or comment, please contact me, Joe Humbert.

Thank you.
Joe