Title: View from the without a Chair

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 02 March 2016 20:36:32 +00:00 or Wed, 02 March 2016 20:36:32 +00:00

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Sadly, at the beginning of January Alan Lenton informed us that he was unable to continue as Chair of the ACCU and was standing down with immediate effect. The committee would like to thank Alan for stepping into the office of Chair in 2014 when the previous chair stood down: thanks Alan!

This unexpected development does however leave the association once again without a chair. Consequently this column represents some thoughts from a subset of the remainder of the committee. It also means that, with apologies, we do not have any details of issues for discussion at the AGM that Alan promised in what turned out to be his final View from the Chair column.

As well as Alan standing down our Secretary, Malcolm Noyes, has informed the committee that he will be standing down at the AGM in April. It is possibly not appreciated that any member can stand for any post and your association needs you! So please consider standing for the office of Chair or Secretary or any of the other offices or just as a committee member – and get in touch today [1]. By the time you get to read this all the proposals for the AGM will most likely have been published. Unfortunately this also means it will probably also be too late to accept nominations for officers or committee members before the AGM but due to recent changes in the rules you will be able to be proposed and nominated on the day of the AGM.

The AGM will as usual be held over lunchtime on the final day of the ACCU conference – although of course you do not need to attend the conference to attend the AGM. Should you have missed the various announcements about the conference, it is once again being held at the Bristol Marriot Hotel from Wednesday 20th to Saturday 23rd April with the usual pre-conference tutorial and workshop day on Tuesday 19th April with keynotes from Andrei Alexandrescu and Jim Coplien, as well as Anna-Jayne Metcalfe who you may recognise from her posts to accu-general and elsewhere. There are as usual too many interesting and intriguing looking sessions to be able to attend them all. Of particular note for this column is the session on Saturday morning devoted to ACCU issues – please come along and let us know your thoughts.

Links to details and registration can be found on the home page of the ACCU website [2].

As the saying goes it never rains but it pours and our long standing web master, Tim Pushman, has informed us that he is going to be retiring from web hosting and that we will need at the very least to move the ACCU website and its associated bits and pieces – such as the mailing lists – elsewhere.

While Tim, being a nice, professional and responsible person, is not pulling the plug immediately we do need to move relatively quickly on this and could really do with some help from any members who have web and hosting experience as those on the committee only have limited experience in these areas.

So if you have at least thought – if not expressed out loud – that the ACCU web site and services could be better here's your chance to make it so.

References

[1] ACCU Committee contact: accu-committee@accu.org

[2] ACCU website: http://accu.org

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