Title: View from the Chair

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 01 May 2018 17:09:40 +01:00 or Tue, 01 May 2018 17:09:40 +01:00

Summary: Bob Schmidt, chair@accu.org

Body: 

The day-to-day operations of ACCU continue to tick along, thanks to the generous donations of time and effort by all of ACCU’s committee members and volunteers.

After five years of declining membership numbers, ACCU finished 2017 with a small increase in membership (673) compared to the end of 2016 (649). The 2017 ACCU Conference also saw an increase in attendance over 2016. (It is possible that the two trends are related, with people joining ACCU in order to take advantage of the conference discount.) While these are positive trends, it is important to note that our total membership of 673 at the end of 2017 still is approximately 31% lower than the 981 members ACCU had in 2007 (the last year for which I could find numbers).

ACCU had other successes in the past year:

• The conference web site continues to be improved, thanks to our Conference Chair, Russel Winder, and his collaborators.
• ACCU’s financial situation remains strong, with ACCU finishing 2017 with a surplus for the fiscal year. The 2017 surplus was 19.4% greater than 2016’s surplus.
• Local group ACCU Cambridge was started up, thanks to the efforts of Andy Saul.
• CVu and Overload continue to be high-quality publications, thanks to editors Steve Love and Fran Buontempo, our reviewers, and our member and non-member contributors.
• We published our new, generalized Code of Conduct, outlining our expectations for people attending any event held under the ACCU banner. (The ACCU Conference will continue to use its more detailed Code of Conduct.)
• Our local group affiliates have continued to experience strong membership growth. (I would warn against reading too much into those numbers, however. A Meetup group has no barrier to entry, and raw numbers don’t necessarily reflect the actual number of people participating in the group. Also, the large increase in local group numbers has not resulted in a similar increase in paid ACCU membership.)
• ACCU awarded an ISDF grant to Mr. Walter Brown for his contributions to WG21, the C++ standards committee.

We still have challenges:

• We continue to find it difficult to recruit volunteers for committee positions. The Web Editor, Publicity, Study Groups, Social Media, and Book Reviews positions remain vacant. The position of Secretary will become vacant as of the AGM, unless someone steps forward and runs during the meeting. Our current treasurer, Rob Pauer, would like to retire, but has graciously agreed to remain in the role until someone volunteers to replace him.
• We are considering moving our web site off of its current platform, Xaraya, and onto a more modern, supported platform. For most things Xaraya is satisfactory, but it hasn’t been updated since October 2015, and its facilities for preventing bot accounts from being created is lacking. (We currently get 100 bot sign-ups per day, with most coming from just three sources.) This will be a long-term project for the committee.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Malcolm Noyes for his service on the committee. Malcolm has served as Secretary for four years, and has decided to retire as of this year’s AGM. Malcolm tried to retire two years ago, but agreed to remain as acting Secretary until the special election of 2016, and ran for, and won, the position again last year. He will be missed.

Finally, a big thank you to all of ACCU’s volunteers: committee members; magazine editors, writers, and reviewers; local group coordinators; and conference committee members.

Local groups

Emyr Williams has notified the committee that he will be standing down as the local group coordinator for Bristol and Bath. (He intends to remain in his position of Standards Officer.) Please join me in thanking Emyr for his work on the local groups.

Call for volunteers

Would you like to be thanked, in this very magazine, by yours truly? Volunteer for any one of ACCU’s open positions, and see your name somewhere in this column in a future issue of CVu.

• Secretary
• Web Editor
• Book Reviews
• Publicity
• Study Groups
• Social Media

Portions of this View appeared in the Annual General Meeting Information Pack as part of the Chair’s Report.

Notes: 

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