Well, we got off to an excellent start with our first Program meeting of the year. Our presenter shared his experiences with outsourcing documentation to his company’s new technical writing department in India, followed by a lively question-and-answer period. We will be planning a follow-up event later in the year, and details will be published in the newsletter and on our Web site in a few months.

The meeting also marked the first test of one of our new technology initiatives — WebTrain (http://www.webtrain.com). WebTrain, among other things, allows people to attend and participate in meetings via the Internet. We will be setting up a WebTrain account for the chapter this fall and exploring ways to use it to benefit our membership. Although the webinar only survived for the first ten minutes of the meeting, it proved to be a successful test. What we learned from the experience, and from the feedback from our two patient online attendees, will be put to good use. Our presenter has generously offered to repeat his presentation at a future date, to be offered as a recorded webinar.

Following our Strategic Plan, and furthering our technology and transformation initiatives, we will soon be expanding our use of GiftTool. The two additional modules will combine with the event registration that we are already using, and will allow us to be more efficient and effective in communicating with our members and volunteers.

Coming soon, we will be holding a few events on topics related to some of the other items in our Strategic Plan. Watch for details to arrive by e-mail and be posted on our Web site. We hope that you will join us to learn more about putting usability into practice, and about building a WIKI…and if you don’t already know what a WIKI is, I will leave you to search online and find out.

Have fun!