As I address my hopes and plans for the coming year, I recall a statement long ago attributed to French writer Emile Zola, who said that artists were nothing without their gifts, but their gifts were nothing without work. That remark resounds helpfully as we face a year of challenges, growth and transformation. In simultaneously advancing the developments already set in place by previous presidents and adding new initiatives, the approaching year is healthily punctuated by multiple opportunities for mindful and productive work to take place in many domains of decision-making.

To begin with, this is a good time to be developing initiatives for the association because ICA is in a very good place. Membership is on the rise, numbering some 4,300 individuals, and it is more international than ever before, spanning 82 countries. Despite an economic recession, our finances remain strong. Our conferences are energized, and our five journals – plus Communication Yearbook -- are producing scholarly work at an impressive pace.

In that each new president begins the year tweaking and adapting existing committees to the goals of the association, I’d like to share with you my vision for ICA’s multiple committees during the coming year. I outlined two goals in the statement I initially made when standing for election -- making ICA members both more familiar to one another and more visible to the public – and I have shaped committee charges as largely "meta" acts of discovery with those goals in mind. I address here the particular charges for each committee during this coming year, so I’d ask you to go online to retrieve information about each committee’s membership:

1. Liaison Committee: The Liaison Committee's assignments generally include connecting with funding agencies, foundations, and other associations; enhancing the visibility of the communication discipline and its researchers as visible targets for funding priorities; and developing grant-writing initiatives for ICA members. In that these tasks have been steadily growing from year to year, I have asked the committee to concentrate on two "meta" tasks for further organizing all liaison-related activities. One involves creating an umbrella strategy for coordinating linkages with relevant organizations: This includes ICA's links to NGOs, UN agencies and other transnational relevant media organizations; ICA's links to other academic organizations (transnational, national and regional) beyond just listing them on the ICA website; and strategies for an 'ambassador model' of linkage, by which ICA representatives would be recognized as a guests or 'observers' by organizations such as the World Summit, UN, and the like. The second involves creating a template for "linking" ICA to other scholarly communication associations, by which the committee will draw up the guidelines for what a formal linking arrangement looks like, delineating both the relevant associations and the linking "template" to which each should subscribe. 
    
2. Student Affairs: The Student Affairs Committee generally addresses the needs and interests of student members and assists in crafting and disseminating student agenda, as well as recommends and promotes policy and activities to enhance student involvement in ICA. Following some interesting survey results last year about student involvement in various aspects of conference programming, this year I have asked the committee to engage in an act of discovery and draw up some basic definitional information on ICA’s graduate student population. Addressing the question of how we might better incorporate students into all levels of the association, the committee is now in the process of creating a student survey targeting student expectations from both the association and the conference. The survey will be circulated to student members in the fall.
    
3. Internationalization Committee: The Internationalization Committee generally recommends policy about the internationalization of ICA, including monitoring the needs of ICA’s international constituency, and recommends and monitors policies and practices that meet the needs of the non-US members of ICA. In light of the fact that the association has internationalized but not equally around the globe, the committee this year will be engaged in two basic tasks: One is to target areas of the world in which we do not have strong membership and to draw up priorities and regions by which ICA might effectively focus its outreach efforts. This includes gathering systematic data regarding how many communication schools there might be in a given location, how many members might be available for outreach, what other academic organizations tend to draw involvement, and the like. The second is to draw up a “job description” for our various at-large board members, in hopes that having a clearer statement of our expectations might facilitate the kind of global engagement we were hoping to enable through this position.
   
4. Membership Committee: The Membership Committee generally works with the ICA Central Office to plan and implement membership recruitment and works with the Internationalization Committee to increase access to ICA by non-US members. In hopes that we might profit from more systematized information about which parts of the association are attractive to whom, this year I have asked the committee to explore membership patterns across rank and ICA’s divisions/interest groups. This includes gathering data about what kinds of internal patterns we have in our membership: who joins which division and interest group? Who joins more than one division and interest group? Is there a correlation between rank of members (student, junior professor, senior professor) and which divisions and interest groups they join?

Similarly, is there a correlation between the country of residence of members and which divisions and interest groups they join? Next month I hope to share information about our various task forces for this coming year. I am looking forward to a fruitful, engaged and energetic year, and in that regard all thoughts, contributions and suggestions will be heartily welcomed.