Page 11 - Fall2021

Seattle, Washington. Susan Fox, our executive director, is leading this work with private sponsors, and Task-Force B is working to find additional interested parties in the private sector. We continue to seek new ideas.
Of course, in addition to increasing revenue, we also need to reduce our expenses where possible over the coming years. Our ASA meetings are among the most important and popular features of the Society and directly serve our mission. We love them, and we want to continue them as they are, if at all possible, but this comes at substantial and increasing overall costs as prices rise each year. Our meet- ings are rarely cost effective and usually lose money. We are revisiting the costs of our currently planned meetings, and we will continue to look for additional ways to generate new revenue (such as meeting sponsorships) and to reduce expenses going forward to stabilize our budget while not reducing the overall value of our meetings to attendees.
Meet Me in Seattle
Turning to the Seattle meeting, I hope you are as ready and excited for it as I am! Seattle will be our first live meeting in two years, and we want it to be as terrific as our previous in-person meetings. We are, however, aware of the Covid-19 and Delta variant challenges that await us this fall, including the possibility that the State of Washing- ton will prohibit live meetings. We are currently developing contingency plans that would allow us to switch to an all vir- tual format and still hold as complete a meeting as possible.
Although we know the that virtual meetings in the Fall 2020 (Acoustics Virtually Everywhere [AVE]) and Spring 2021 (Acoustics in Focus [AiF]) had many positive fea- tures, several obstacles will prevent us from making Seattle a hybrid meeting. First, the Pacific Time Zone makes it difficult for people outside the United States to access the meeting in real time. For example, 11 a.m. in Seattle is 8 p.m. in Europe and 4 a.m. in Japan. Second, live broadcasts of technical sessions and other events increase meeting planning and expenses substantially, given that a hybrid meeting incurs all the fixed expenses of an in-person meeting plus the personnel, software, and hardware necessary to support the virtual components.
Nonetheless, we know there are ASA members for whom virtual sessions are truly an advantage, and for this reason, the Meetings Reimagined Ad Hoc Committee, chaired by Scott Sommerfeldt, and supported by the Virtual
Technology Task Force Ad Hoc Committee, chaired by Andrew Piacsek, is hard at work considering the options for future meetings, including how to best utilize many of the successful virtual features, new meeting styles and
schedules, and how to make our future meetings (includ- ing international and joint meetings) revenue neutral or even revenue positive while supporting the ASA mission and bringing value to attendees.
To that end, I am pleased to report that we plan to con- tinue several features from the last two virtual meetings, AVE and AiF. First, holding the Administrative Com-
mittee meetings before the main ASA meeting allowed committee members to attend all of the technical sessions at AVE and AiF. We polled the committee members, and many of these committees have elected to continue meet- ing virtually in advance of the Seattle meeting.
A highlight of the AVE and AiF meetings was the success- ful introduction of keynote presentations by Past President Diane Kewley-Port, and we will continue to showcase key- notes as we go back to in-person meetings. Although the open TC meetings were broadcast live during AiF to all ASA members, including those who did not register for the meeting, in Seattle, we will return the TC meetings to their usual early evening times, which would make a live broad- cast impractical for those outside the Pacific Time Zone.
ASA Is Your Organization. Participate in It!
As I end this column, let me leave you with some thoughts about how I hope you will get involved in the direction of the ASA. As most of you know, the ASA is largely a grass- roots volunteer organization supported by an outstanding staff. This makes serving on ASA committees both reward- ing and important. There are many opportunities for ASA members to join committees that actively contribute to the current operations and future direction. I want to par- ticularly encourage new members to consider one of the following ways to become involved in the Society.
The entry level for volunteering is through your technical interest area. When you joined the ASA, you indicated one or more areas of interest and became an interest member, such as a Speech Communication interest member.
Each of the 13 technical interest areas has a Technical Committee (TC), usually composed of a subset of the interest members. To become a TC member, you must
Fall 2021 • Acoustics Today 11