This week we’re visiting 3 potential hotels for the 2010 conference. We hope to have dates and hotel confirmed by the end of June.

Discussion online will be available until Wednesday, June 17 at 11:59 pm PST

Voting will be available from Thursday, June 18 until Thursday, July 2 at 11:59 pm PST; voting instructions will be available via email on Thursday, June 18th. Please make sure you have renewed your NACCS membership in order to be able to vote.

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At the 2009 NACCS National Conference in New Brunswick, the NACCS National Board submitted a resolution to dissolve the Research Divisions that were instituted in 2005.  Over the course of the last three years, said Research Divisions have been evaluated and determined to be ineffective; overall, they lack sufficient interest and active membership to sustain them.  If passed, the resolution will remove Article VIII of the NACCS By-Laws, which describes the Research Divisions.  By dissolving these divisions,  NACCS will save time and resources related to maintaining them, such as setting aside time in the schedule and reserving space at annual conferences.  The National Board believes this will allow more time for members to be actively involved in their Focos and Caucuses, where affinity groups tend to develop organically.  Furthermore, affinity groups will change over time according to research interests and, therefore, should be more flexible and organic.  One way to facilitate such a process is to provide an informal space for members to network with others with similar research interests—topics can be determined on an annual basis.  This is a bottom-up approach that the board believes would be much more effective than the current top-down system.  Any current Research Division listservs that are active would remain as such.
Resolution: Dissolution of the Research Divisions - Submitted by the National Board

WHEREAS Research Divisions were instituted in 2005 under a provisional status which required that they be evaluated for a two year period to determine whether or not they were viable or generated sufficient interest;

WHEREAS the NACCS By-laws require a Research Division to have a minimum of thirty members and many Research Division has managed to attain said criteria;

WHEREASthe majority of Research Division listservs have not been constituted or remain inactive;

WHEREASmany of Research Divisions do not have active members;

WHEREAS the probationary period for evaluating the Research Divisions expired in 2008;

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Research Divisions be discontinued and removed from the by-laws.

BY-LAWS IMPLICATIONS:
Exact items to be removed from the NACCS By-laws: Article VIII

COST:
NACCS will save time and resources related to maintaining and supporting the Research Divisions such as reserving spaces at the national annual meeting and maintaining listservs.

1/20/2009: The program is coming together ahead of schedule. Its our hope to have the notifications soon, perhaps even by this coming weekend.

1/10/2009: Chair-Elect and Program Chair, Nohemy Solorzano-Thompson; Executive Director Julia Curry; and Kathryn Blackmer Reyes are in San Jose this weekend (Jan. 9-11) organizing the NACCS program. The submissions have been read by readers selected by the Program Chair.  After this weekend, the program work will continue to prepare for the notifications.  We will try to get the notification out to submitters as soon as possible but no later than January 31st.

Hello everybody!

 Four resolutions have been posted as separate pages on this blog. You can see them near the top of the right column listed under: Pages. Please click on the resolution to go to that page and read the text. At the bottom of that page you can click on “Comments” to leave your…comments.

Voting will open on Sunday May 18th at 9:00 a.m. PT and will take place in the MEMBER ONLY section.  Member logins will be emailed prior to the opening of voting.

Thank you for helping us use this new format to expand discussion about these important NACCS issues.

Happy New Year — forward to our 36th year as an organization! This is our Inaugural posting. We hope you come to visit this blog for information not available through our primary website. This blog is a work in progress. It constitutes another form of communication for our membership.

Current activities as of 12/28, the Chair-Elect along with the Executive and Associate Executive Director meet in San Jose, California on the 29th to begin the presentation formatting of the accepted proposals. Readers received their assigned proposals a month ago. Based on their recommendations, accepted proposals will be scheduled into a preliminary program. Notification of reading outcomes and schedules will be sent out by email on January 31, 2008.

As you read in the last newsletter, Business meeting #2 has been removed from the schedule. This decision is intended to give all members the ability to participate in Association business regardless of whether they attend the annual conference and business meeting.

History:
Prior to 1997, NACCS only had one business meeting that included Coordinating Committee (sic) introductions, Foco and Caucus reports, Coordinator and Treasurer reports, and resolutions. In 1996, during the CC Midyear meeting in Sacramento, the CC decided to separate the activities into two.

Prior to 1999, any one attending our business meetings regardless of their membership status were able to vote on resolutions. At the time the Association did not have a proper count of its membership. By 1999, the development of a member database and active membership renewals and recruitment, NACCS for the first time was able to identify who were current members. During the San Antonio meetings in 1999, the member voting card was introduced. This action was very successful and drew conference participants, who were members, to participate in the business meeting.

In 2003, for the first time NACCS moved to online voting for its leadership. Prior to 2002, the Coordinator, Treasure and Secretary were selected by the CC (from the CC body) at the end of the conference. The membership did not know who the current leadership was until the next newsletter. In 2001, the membership voted on a CC resolution to change the CC structure to include a Chair-Elect and by 2002, the first member based election of NACCS leaders would occur. The Chair-Elect would not be selected internally by the CC but rather open nominations of NACCS members were received. The 2002 Chair-Elect was a mail ballot. In 2003 the election was moved to online for member only voting.

Current:
As NACCS has grown and also continued to develop better methods to recruit and renew members, along with developing our conference registration records, our records are showing that many of our members do not attend the conference, thus not all members are able to participate in the Association’s business even if they wanted too.

With the development and reliability of electronic formats like blogs and along with our current work to develop membership participation, the NACCS leadership felt that now was a good time to move another membership activity online. Given our transition to voting for our leadership online allows us to use the same methods to vote on members resolutions. Details of how resolutions and voting will follow. We aspirer to expanding membership participation and voice through this means.