Welcome to ICA's first Annual Report!

Initiating an annual report - for the benefit of both members and interested others - provides me with the opportunity to announce that it's been a very good year for the association. The institutional basics of great conferences, strong publications, effective organisation, sound finances and growing membership - now over 4000 members worldwide - are all in place and have been for some time. This frees us to ask, what next for ICA and how should we get there?

Many such issues were discussed in Division and Interest Group meetings, at the Board of Directors' meeting, and informally in the corridors during the recent annual conference in Montreal. And of course, as we make positive advances, new issues continue to arise; thus lively conversations about ICA's priorities and future direction are unending!

Now that my presidency is complete, I'll take this occasion to review how ICA has moved forward over the past year, following the priorities I set out in my 2005 candidate statement of internationalisation, transparency, visibility.

Internationalisation

Making ICA more international has been a priority for the association for some years, for it has required some significant structural and cultural changes. I think there are good signs that ICA is, indeed, becoming more international - in its membership, its conferences and publications and, less tangible but not less important, in its awareness of diverse modes of scholarship world wide and its ambition to bring these together constructively. Our new journal just launched, Communication, Culture, & Critique, edited by Karen Ross, is an excellent illustration of this ambition.

In the past year, the internationalisation committee has been very active, initiating a Board policy on supporting regional conferences (several of which are to be held this and next year, in Mexico City, Melbourne and Budapest - check out www.icahdq.org) and proposing the Board decision that each Member-at-Large should nominate two candidates for ICA awards each year. The board also agreed, in January, that efforts to further internationalise the association would be an agenda item for division and interest group business meetings in Montreal. Further ideas as to how to advance this agenda are most welcome.

The composition of ICA's committees this year was roughly half US scholars and half from a wide range of countries, thus over-representing international scholars when compared with membership. This balance also applied to the awards committees but, notwithstanding the best efforts of the committees and without belying the excellence of this year's recipients, I note that it is still proving difficult to encourage an international spread of award nominations. Nominating excellent scholarship for ICA awards could and should be, I urge, something for all members to undertake every now and again.

Turning to publications, the publications committee this year debated styles for manuscript submission, recognising that conventions vary by country. Although it was agreed that APA would remain the publication style, it was made clear that for those unfamiliar with APA, style should not affect publication decisions. ICA's publisher, Wiley-Blackwell has an author assistance program now in place to provide, for a fee, editorial assistance in meeting language and style requirements. Most exciting, last year's decision to translate all ICA journal abstracts into French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean is now well established. These can be accessed from both the publisher's and the journals' websites.

I've been working to increase our links with other communication associations. The newly formed European association (ECREA) has now joined ICA, as has the Spanish Communication Association, and discussions are underway with the Asian Media and Information Centre (AMIC), among others. Following a request from the International Federation of Communication Associations, the Executive Committee has agreed to provide resources, both financial and in kind, to help its efforts especially to support the formation of new communication associations in developing countries.

Some members have noticed that I work down the corridor from the current president of IAMCR! I have taken this coincidence of presidencies (!) to clarify and extend our friendly working relations with IAMCR by negotiating a formal Memorandum of Understanding (members can see this on the members' only section of the website, under 'governance'). Approved in the January board meeting, this accords IAMCR honorary Association status in ICA, meaning for example that all IAMCR members can register for ICA conferences at the members' rate, as well as encouraging more informal collaboration between our two associations.

One long-hoped-for task is now coming to fruition, namely that the ICA website should be a resource by which to locate communication associations around the world, whether or not they are formally linked to ICA. The Internationalisation Committee and others have been collecting names and urls for as many associations as possible, and Sam Luna has done a fantastic job of linking them into an interactive world map on the website. The idea is that, if you are visiting another country, or want to find information about communication scholarship outside your own country, this would be a great place to start. The list of communication associations that we have so far, while growing fast, is nonetheless incomplete and anyone reading this is invited to add to the list if possible.

Transparency

I was partly inspired to stress the importance of transparency in my election statement because, when I first stood for election, so many people asked me - but how does ICA work, who does what, how is the money spent and, most important perhaps, I don't know how to get involved. So, working closely with the ICA office, we've put a lot of effort into the website this year to improve transparency, building on the big redesign of the website in the previous year.

The Board of Directors' meeting minutes are now posted on the members' only section of the website (under 'Governance'), along with the association's budget. We hope, too, that the redesigned website makes it easier to find out what all the committees do, what task forces exist, who won previous years' awards, and more.

Since transparency doesn't only mean putting the information online, but also means helping people find it, we've introduced a Frequently Asked Questions feature, both to address questions directly and to provide convenient links to different parts of the website. The FAQs on the ICA home page should aid both members and anyone else wanting to know more about ICA, including those who might join and want to learn more first. Do check these out on the home page and, if you wish to suggest an additional FAQ, let us know and we will add it. soon to be added is a further set of members only FAQs, designed to answer specific questions about governance and participation, such as how is ICA governed, how are divisions and interest groups established, what does the board do, and how are things decided - officers, conferences, budgets, and so forth.

Beyond letting people know what ICA is up to, for example via the FAQs and the production of this Annual Report, the purpose of transparency is to facilitate accountability of officer-holders to the membership and, further, to enable more people to become more involved so as to take forward improvements and new initiatives. To this end, Sam Luna has created a social networking facility on the website to make it easier to find colleagues according to member profiles and to hold discussions in division/interest group forums. This will be most useful if all members fill out their member profile on the ICA website.

Visibility

In my election statement, I expressed concern that, although communication is well established in many countries in terms of teaching, scholarship, publication and policy, it is not always as visible as we would hope to the wider public - both the general public and the specialist publics of other academic disciplines, funding organisations and policy makers.

Some of the initiatives noted above, in terms of internationalisation and transparency, will enhance the visibility of the association and, more importantly, communication scholarship - for example, the journal abstracts in multiple languages, the annual report and the links with other communication associations. The recent expansion of ICA awards, to recognise and reward excellent work in urban communication, communication research as a collaborative practice and as an agent of social change, and the award for those outside communication who have significantly contributed to it, should also aid visibility.

Coming soon is a newly enhanced ICA Newsletter, following the appointment as Content Editor of Mohan Dutta. He will be including short articles on, for example, research from all continents, current policy debates, major conferences, ICA award winners, and more - all to promote communication scholarship. Also, ICA continues year on year to expand its range of publications - this past year has seen the first book on the annual conference theme, entitled Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation and edited by Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen; and it has seen the long-awaited appearance of the 12-volume International Encyclopedia of Communication, edited by Wolfgang Donsbach.

I know that my successors, now Patrice Buzzanell and, next, Barbie Zelizer, are keen to advance the visibility of communication scholarship over the coming few years. One difficulty is that publicity is expensive: for example, it would take significant resources to appoint even a part-time press officer to promote our activities and research, though this might be of great value. Another issue - perhaps also an exciting opportunity - is the question of open access publication, for this would make communication research much more widely and easily available but at a cost to the traditional publication business model and, it might be added, to a key source of revenue for ICA. This is a fast moving issue and is now very much on ICA's agenda.

Many of the foregoing, and many other, initiatives and activities are outlined in the pages of this Annual Report. The report includes accounts of the past year's work from all ICA's divisions, interest groups, committees and task forces, as well as reports from the Fellows, the Executive Director, and more. Further information, as always, can be obtained from the website and from the Office in Washington. Don't hesitate to ask.

Finally, I warmly thank all those who have worked with me over the past year or more, and I offer my very best wishes to ICA's new president, Patrice Buzzanell, and to all those who, I know, will continue to work hard to ensure this association offers its members, and the field of communication, its very best energies and ideas in the coming year.