For my first Presidential column, I'd like to comment on the recent and successful annual ICA conference in San Francisco, while it's fresh in our minds and for the benefit of those who could not attend this year. Next month, I'll review the year ahead, as I see it, noting what's on the agenda for ICA in the coming months.

It was indeed exciting that so many delegates, from so many countries, attended the San Francisco conference this year, continuing a run of well-attended conferences in recent years, whether held in the USA or, as for last year's conference in Dresden, outside it. As quite a few people asked me what my role was, as Conference Chair, I'll begin there.

The first task was to identify a conference theme which, in San Francisco, was "Creating Communication: Culture, Control, and Critique." With this theme, I was keen to bring into focus the analysis of how the economic, social, political, and technological conditions for creating communication are changing. For these changes are challenging who can communicate what to whom and how, with fascinating implications for established processes of power, for both the reality and the theory of mass communication as well as for face-to-face communication in a context of ubiquitous mediated communication. It also raises questions about public participation in communication in all its diversity and about the status of critical scholarship, among others.

The next task was to bring the theme to life through the plenary keynote panels, and I thank all the speakers and chairs who took part in these. It was good to see a huge ballroom full for the opening panel, on "Communication and Critique: Reflections on the Critical Role of Communication Scholarship," chaired by Susan Douglas. Plenary speakers Angela McRobbie, Robin Mansell, Bella Mody, and Ellen Seiter articulated a diverse range of approaches to critique that echoed the concerns and dilemmas of many in the audience, and prioritizing some challenging values to be debated throughout the conference.

A second plenary panel overflowed the room, asking the topical question, "What's So Significant About Social Networking? Web 2.0 and Its Critical Potential." Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, Henry Jenkins, and Tiziana Terranova, chaired by Fred Turner, raised some lively challenges for our field, and I saw lots of people taking detailed notes! I particularly enjoyed Henry Jenkins' rapid nine-point analysis of YouTube as a new cultural phenomenon.

John Thompson, chaired by Michael Schudson, led the discussion in our third plenary panel, on "The Politics of Publishing", by arguing that the success of the academic journal has all but killed the book - especially that academic favorite, the monograph. Respondent Jayne Fargnoli of ICA's journal publisher, Blackwell, held out more optimistic prospects for books written for a wider public appeal, while John Willensky challenged the commercial frame of journal and book publishing by advocating public access to public knowledge.

Last but not least, the fourth panel examined "News, Journalism, and the Democratic Potential of Blogging," with Jay Rosen, Geert Lovink, Fausto Colombo, and Gaye Tuchman, chaired by Nico Carpentier. This panel opened with considerable enthusiasm for the disruptive, even emancipatory potential of blogging but became gradually more downbeat as critical scrutiny revealed some tough realities in the practice and potential of this new communicative form.

In establishing these plenary events, I worked closely with Theme Chair Nico Carpentier and with Benjamin de Cleen - he'll edit the theme book, "Participation and Media Production: Critical reflections on Content Creation." He was responsible for the 16 competitive theme sessions and, an innovation for this year's conference, for the four grassroots panels held on Saturday and Sunday evenings. These brought local activists, citizen journalists, regulators and other civil society actors into debate with the academy on the themes of "Participatory Models and Alternative Content Production," "A Dialogue about Mobility: Wi-Fi Rollout and the San Francisco Model," "Alternative Journalisms," and "Civil Society and Regulation."

The Sunday film program was a further innovation for the conference this year - one especially apt for the conference theme, as it allowed us to highlight the work of independent and local filmmakers and to open up some dialogue with their directors. I'd like to thank Nico Carpentier, Benjamin de Cleen, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Susanna Kaiser, John Kim, Glynda Hull, and others for their work on the theme events and film program. On the theme website, at http://www.vub.ac.be/icatheme07, both Nico Carpentier and Susanna Kaiser offer informative and reflective reports on the theme and film programs, respectively, revealing some of the ambitions behind our planning as well as some of the challenges and difficulties we faced.

Of course, most of the responsibility for the lively and high-quality panels and papers lies with the Divisions and Special Interest groups, who worked hard to select papers and plan the program, with the reviewers who coped brilliantly with a 30% increase in submission numbers over last year, and with ICA members who delivered such stimulating papers. The annual conference also gets its particular character from a series of "regular" events - the Student Lounge, the Interactive Paper Plenary session, the New Member and Graduate Student Orientation session, the chance to meet the ICA journal editors, and much more.

Vital to the democratic potential of ICA itself was the Annual Members' Business Meeting, very well attended this year, at which ICA's work over the past year is presented to its membership by the President. This is also when the Awards Ceremony is held, and when the Presidential address is delivered. Ron Rice's account of "Unusual Routines: Organisational NonSensemaking" was of striking relevance to the nonsense of our daily working lives in the academy! That was Ron's last event as ICA President, and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank him for everything he's done for the association, both up front and behind the scenes, especially as ICA is doing so well in many ways.

Last January, the ICA Board of Directors voted to increase the amount of travel funds available to support conference participation - especially among students and scholars travelling from overseas. The result was a threefold increase in applications, and we were able to provide financial support for all those who applied - 5 faculty from the UN's B and C countries, 18 students residing outside the USA, and 45 students residing in the USA (though these, too, were a pretty international group). I hope we can raise more funds for this purpose in the future, and am grateful also to this year's sponsors of the conference - the Universities of Virginia, Amsterdam (Ascor), Stanford, and Emory (Claus M. Halle Institute), and the publishers Blackwell, Sage, Polity, and Nordicom.

In bringing so many scholars to San Francisco, it was good to draw on some of the fantastic resources of the city - in the form of the grassroots and other sessions as part of the conference programme, in the eight pre-conferences that were held both in the Hilton and also at Berkeley, Stanford and San Francisco State University, by holding an evening reception in the elegant Asian Art Museum, and in the range of local information we provided - about tours, food, and places to visit to make the most of being in the city. Thanks are due here to the local host committee, cochaired by Heather Hudson and Seeta Peña Gangadharan with help from Mike Ananny, John Kim, Daniel Kreiss, and Vanessa Vega.

As I have said in these pages before, every year the ICA conference chair learns this process from scratch! Hence my heartfelt thanks to everyone who worked with me to help make the conference as good as it could be! I hope too that everyone enjoyed the "civilised' conference day - starting at 9 a.m. and finishing at 5.45, and it was nice to be able to provide coffee, cake and - even more essential than these - wireless access in the main exhibit hall. And most important to the success of the whole enterprise, I'd like to thank Michael Haley and his great team at the ICA office - Sam Luna, Deandra Tolson, Tina Zeigler, and Mike West. I hope ICA members realise how they work tirelessly behind the scenes before and during the conference. I hope they feel a little more rested now it's behind them!

In the next issue, I'll set out the agenda for ICA during the coming year, with some reflections on what I hope to achieve in my year as President. At that point, I shall also invite comments, suggestions, criticisms and contributions from ICA's membership - I shall look forward to hearing from you all!