After the annual conference, one of the new ICA president's first activities is to specify the various committees and special task forces' tasks in the year ahead. In this way, the president can put into action some of her or his ambitions for the association. It's also a way of balancing continuity and change by advancing the developments already underway by the committees, as instituted by the outgoing president, and adding some further initiatives.

So I spent much of June thinking how to translate my ideas for ICA, along with those that others have suggested to me in recent months, into feasible tasks that the already busy people who volunteer to serve on ICA's committees, as well as those (also busy people) in the ICA office in Washington, can undertake. This Newsletter piece seemed to provide a good opportunity to lay out some of these plans for ICA members.

This is a good time for ICA - membership is strong, conference participation is buoyant, and Blackwell is doing a great job with our journals. Still, there are questions and concerns - is ICA sufficiently international, or can participation from underrepresented parts of the world be improved? How will our journals compete as specialist journals in our field continue to proliferate? Could the association do more for its student members? Is it exciting or problematic that the number of special interest groups is growing? And so on.

In my personal statement when standing for election, I stressed the importance for ICA of transparency, internationalisation and visibility. This threefold agenda allows me to organise the key points I have been discussing with the committees in the past few weeks, and I hope to report positive developments in all three areas when I review my presidential year at the end of 2007-8.

1) Transparency. This matters for two reasons. First, ICA is a member association, so the principle of accountability is crucial. People repeatedly ask me, reasonably enough, how committees are selected, how award decisions are taken, and how the money is spent. At present, much of this information is on the website, but it's not always laid out in the most accessible way. What isn't on the website can always be asked of the ICA office, but that's perhaps less convenient than it could be. Second, people often ask because they want to get involved, and the more transparent an organisation, the easier it is to see what has or hasn't been done and how one could contribute.

In the next few months, we'll be clarifying and adding information and resources to the website. This will include the agenda and minutes of the Board of Directors' meetings (incorporating reports from committees), and a Frequently Asked Questions page to explain how the association works. I shall produce an Annual Report next year, and, if members find it useful, future presidents may continue this. The newsletter is another means of achieving transparency, so the Publications Committee is working to support a content editor who will invite and edit academic contributions that report on initiatives, events, and debates in communication around the world, and we'll try to keep members updated on developments within the association as well.

2) Internationalization. Much progress has already been made here, including the translation of ICA journal abstracts into six languages, increased travel support for conference attendance for students and those from the UN's B and C countries, and a series of ICA-sponsored regional conferences on different continents. More informal but equally important is the association's growing reflexivity regarding the important principles of openness, inclusiveness, and diversity as guides to all ICA's activities, including reviewing, publication and awards' decisions, division and interest group management, and even the very style of our online and offline communications with each other.

The internationalization agenda is now being executed by the Membership Committee (charged with encouraging membership from currently underrepresented countries), by the Liaison Committee (concerned with ICAs relations with other key organisation), by the Awards and Publications Committees (as they consider their calls for editors, award nominees, and reviewers), and by the Internationalisation Committee itself. Those committees are now implementing links on the website to as many national, regional and international communication associations as possible, in order to facilitate international collaboration. It is also working with the ICA office to enhance the "Find A Colleague" function on the website so it can really be useful for identifying research collaborators worldwide, sharing research interests and locating contributors or reviewers in a range of countries.

3) Visibility. While communication scholars are confident that communication matters, it is sometimes a source of frustration when our field is neglected on occasion by those in adjacent fields and, especially, by funding agencies, policy makers, or government institutions that should, we believe, recognize and value our work. Raising the visibility of research and scholarship in communication, beyond the efforts we make as individual ambassadors for our field, is not easy and can be both time-consuming and expensive. So here my ambitions are more modest.

However, the Liaison Committee is deliberating on what can be done to raise the profile of communication research with key organisations. Our redesigned website and newsletter, especially with added academic content geared towards transparency and collaboration, should also increase our visibility. Other initiatives might draw on the undoubted skills of communication scholars in promoting their research and their discipline widely across public and policy circles. I'm pleased that Blackwell is issuing press releases for selected articles in each journal; we might also do more to draw media attention to our work.

These are some of the main developments underway. I don't have space to elaborate here, but I hope to have given you a sense of what's going on, and I shall use this column to update ICA members as things progress. As always, your thoughts, contributions, and suggestions are most welcome.