While the Chicago conference is still a fresh memory for many, I'd like to capture some of its energy and share conference highlights with those who were and were not there.

As the conference was closing down, one of our Division/Interest Group heads - who will remain anonymous unless s/he chooses to claim authorship - remarked that this conference experience was unlike any other to date: Driven by a theme that tried to facilitate conversation among members of dissimilar Divisions and Interest Groups, it introduced multiple opportunities to come together with individuals from across the association and in so doing changed the energy level in the conference venue. ICA became, at least for the 5 days of our Chicago experience, a frenzied, robust, intellectually stimulating, and interpersonally engaged setting, transforming generally like-minded members of a formal group into raucous and energized individuals with a point to prove.

I take this comment (offered here with some paraphrasing) as a compliment of the highest order, for it suggests that the conference theme of "Keywords in Communication" and the various programming initiatives it engendered - cross-unit sessions, themed panels, programming on shared terms of relevance, even neighborhood tours - succeeded in connecting ICA members with each other in singular and unusual ways. I have heard multiple similar sentiments in the weeks since the conference closed - that it underscored novel points of intellectual crossover, suggested innovative paths for scholarly endeavor, fomented new and unpredictable associations among members.

Not only was the quality of sessions among the highest and most invigorating in memory, but attendance was over the top. Despite some last-minute cancellations due to the onset of the swine flu, ICA 2009 was the second largest conference in the association's history with 2,197 members in attendance, making it a close second to our 2005 conference in New York City. We awarded a total of $36,195 in support for ICA members, giving $10,400 in travel grants to B/C Students, $7,350 to B/C Faculty, $6,200 to A Students, $400 to A Faculty, and conference waivers of $11,845.

The conference bustled with excitement and enthusiasm across all of its multiple features. We enrolled 12 preconferences, two more than in preceding years; while all of them filled impressively, three booked to capacity. Our various off-site tours - including our innovative neighborhood tours to historical and cultural sites of interest in Chicago - booked in nine different venues across the 5-day conference and offered ICA members multiple ways to explore the terrific city of Chicago. Our opening plenary - on "Keywords in Regulation: How the FCC and Others See Regulation in the Digital Age," with FCC Acting Commissioner Michael Copps, Robin Mansell, Joseph Torres, and Georgette Wang - and our first-ever closing plenary - on "Communication and Shock Resistance: The Role of Narrative in Meeting the Current Crises," with Canadian author, journalist, and activist Naomi Klein - filled to standing room capacity and generated enthusiastic response across association members. Our first-ever closing reception offered a large gathering of ICA members the elegant combination of jazz music, delicious food, and wine to celebrate together the conference's completion.

Particularly relevant were the various programming initiatives associated with the conference theme. Using "Keywords in Communication" as a guide to thinking about the central terms of relevance that shape what we value as a field, ICA 2009 combined theme panels, cross-unit sessions (which brought together individuals from at least four divisions and interest groups addressing a keyword of shared relevance), and theme programming within the various divisions and interest groups to create an energized association-wide address to the fundamental questions of why we have come to value the intellectual parameters we've set in place and what this means to us as a field moving forward. Drawing from these parameters, theme chair Stuart Allan has already activated an impressive lineup of scholars for the ICA theme book. Titled Rethinking Communication: Keywords in Communication Research, the volume will bring together scholarly addresses to a variety of central terms discussed at the conference.

ICA 2009 also experimented successfully with a number of initiatives that are propelling the association into its next generation. We maintained a 48% acceptance rate and programmed 509 sessions - including paper, panel, poster, reception, meeting, and roundtable discussions -- while end-loading more and more higher-ranked programming onto Monday, the last day of the conference, in an attempt to keep the conference vital from beginning to end. Given the extremely high attendance at events like the Closing Reception and the Closing Plenary, it looks like we've accomplished our aim of convincing ICA members to stay with the conference through its unfolding.

We followed on Immediate Past President Patrice Buzzanell's initiative to program miniplenaries but this time populated them with keyword initiatives - on communication, the message, the city, and the public sphere - and introduced a professional element that foregrounded panels on funding for junior scholars' research and on seeking alternative modes of academic work within plenary settings. The sessions' high attendance seems to reflect a latent need in our membership for programming of this sort.

We separated our business meeting from our awards ceremony and presidential address so as to further accommodate multiple interests in the association, and Patrice Buzzanell enacted her final act as ICA President on the latter, delivering her account of "Resilience: Talking, Resisting, and Imagining New Normalcies Into Being." I thank her for a year filled with energy, good will, and thoughtful initiatives and connections moving forward. As part of our greening initiative, we programmed a panel on greening ICA, shaped in conjunction with a task force on the same topic, provided a recyclable conference bag with no handouts, and offered for the first time a flash-drive program with abstracts in lieu of a printed program. Almost half of the conference's registrants made the flash drive their preference.

When I articulated my platform for taking on the helm of ICA, I shared two goals I hope to address as ICA President: One is to make ICA's members more visible to each other. I am gratified that the resounding success of the Chicago conference sets us firmly and energetically on the path to making internal visibility more of a reality than it has been till now. My second goal is to make ICA's members more public to the world beyond ICA. We now stand at 4,253 members, 36% of whom are non-U.S. in a year of a conference held in the United States, promising that we will rise to 40% non-U.S. membership next year when we meet in Singapore. These data suggest that ICA has a real role to play in the global public sphere. I will be working on that initiative and related actions in the coming months, and I will share with you in my coming columns the ways in which I hope to make those initiatives a reality.

In the meantime, let me say once again how grateful I am to all of ICA's members for willingly and good-naturedly experimenting with the programming initiatives that made ICA 2009 such a remarkable experience, to all of the ICA reviewers who gave their time to make the program the best it could be, and to the various division and interest group chairs who seamlessly accommodated the contingencies of implementation. I thank the ICA Executive Committee - Patrice Buzzanell, Sonia Livingstone, Ron Rice, Jon Nussbaum, and Francois Cooren for offering assistance along the way. Thanks to my theme chair, Stuart Allan, for keeping an eye on the keywords initiative within the burgeoning conference submissions; to programming assistant Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt for assiduously programming glitches while suggesting many programming charms; to the local organizing committee - cochairs James Ettema and Kevin Barnhurst and committee members Pablo Boczkowski, Eszter Hargittai, Steve Jones, John Nerone, David Park, and Andrew Rojecki for supporting international engagement through innovative local initiatives; to this year's generous sponsors - Wiley-Blackwell, Northwestern University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Sage Publications, Routledge-Taylor and Francis Group, Peter Lang Publishing, University of Central Florida and Polity Publishing, who in a year of dwindling returns nonetheless positioned ICA at the top of their priorities; and finally, to the terrific Michael Haley and his team at ICA headquarters - Sam Luna, Deandra Harris, Mike West, and Tina Ziegler -- without whom this association would function as only a fraction of its ever-expanding self. Congrats to us all for a conference well done!