With the opening of the academic year in many places around the world, September offers us a chance to think about renewing our commitments to our departments, our universities, the field, and those aspects we value most about each of them. I'd like to address that moment of repositioning as I take note again of something I noted in my statement for election a year and a half ago: Communication has tremendous relevance, much of it unrequited. What more can we do to make ourselves more identifiable to each other and more visible to the outside world? ICA now has in place six task forces, four of which I recently appointed so as to push consideration of who we might be in a slightly modulated setting. The constitution of each task force can be found on the association website.

Our task forces for this coming year include:

1) Task force on greening the association
Greening our environment remains one of the most critical goals facing us today, and large, scholarly associations are highly relevant to its achievement. This task force has been established to address the question of what it would take to move ICA to a green association. Set up last year, the task force is charged with reconsidering each of our practices as related to conferences, journals, the home office and all other activities that come under the ICA label. It also is responsible for developing a more forward-looking sensibility about what ICA can do to help the environment. To that end, the task force held an informative brainstorming session at ICA in Chicago, and is now processing member sentiments made at that meeting, as well as investigating other existing templates for going green, so as to issue a report to the board this coming year.

2) Task force on selecting an ICA press officer
Communication as a field of knowledge, and ICA as its premier academic association, do not have the kind of public visibility one might hope for. The goal of making ICA more visible means having the function in hand to enhance that visibility, and this task force is probing the steps necessary to make a press function workable for the association. In discerning how we can develop a press function so as to enhance public visibility and familiarity with our work, the task force has been charged with defining the press function, assessing how to decide on a press officer and delineating a press officer's responsibilities (particularly given the international spread of the association's members). It also will track the kinds of media coverage ICA members presently receive and the difference in patterns of coverage across ICA's constituent countries. The task force will be issuing a report to the board in Singapore.

3) Task force on redesigning ICA's logo
Patterns and expectations of aesthetic and technical design change with time, and so too with the ICA logo, which was last designed in 1981-82. This task force is addressing the development of a new logo, in hopes that we will produce a redesigned identity mark that is more in keeping both with who we are today and with the times (writ broadly). A new logo will both reflect a consonance with current aesthetic and technical standards while maintaining continuity with the existing design, and our hope is that it will extend on the current one, be up-to-date and dynamic, fit the scholarly association, and reflect its international reach. In regard for the ethical standards of the Graphic Arts Guild, we have elected not to conduct a standard competition across submitted designs but to assess the preexisting work of submitters, along with verbal descriptions of how they envision a new logo. This task force will assess that work and select on advisory status the individual who will then be slated to produce the new logo. Our hope is that we will have a redesigned logo in place by the end of the current academic year.

4) Task force on multiple language submission
As ICA becomes ever more international, the question of which languages we use to conduct our business continues to require address. Last year I set up a task force on multiple language submission, which was tasked with exploring the idea of submitting papers to the yearly conference in multiple languages, to be then translated into English for presentation. The idea was that we could use the existing language capacity of our members to collectively take responsibility for reviewing submissions in multiple languages. The task force did commendable work exploring the various technical opportunities and obstacles that this effort might raise. Its initial efforts were followed up with queries to members about the viability of the idea, conveyed through the Division and Interest Group heads. ICA members have been very generous in offering their views and raised multiple issues which we'd need to work out were we to proceed. Fundamentally, the big question of how to activate the idea without ghettoizing or marginalizing submissions still needs to be further thought through. Our plan is to explore the idea unofficially with Singapore - perhaps with submissions in Mandarin - while temporarily suspending official task force efforts until we see the results in Singapore.

5) Task force on fundraising
Fundraising, in the best of economic times, is essential for a growing association, and given the economic crisis of this past year it has taken on new relevance. This task force is a continuation of a group established by past ICA President Sonia Livingstone, who charged it with brainstorming the fundraising opportunities that might be available for the association. The fundraising task force conducted two focus groups this past year - one senior, one junior - as part of a larger process of developing a potential fundraising campaign. The focus groups helped the task force test and develop themes and ideas about how members think about the association, and what they would support in the way of fundraising efforts and appeals that might work in internal funding efforts. They also helped test potential ideas around priorities and ways of explaining the organization's needs. Though the task force is still transcribing the interviews and analyzing the data, it reports useful and enlightening responses, with much good news about the level of identity and investment members feel in the association and remarkably strong support for the idea of fundraising, particularly for the targeted areas of support for junior scholars and international scholars. The task force's final report will be made available to the membership at the conference in Singapore.

6) Task force on policy
The question of policy initiatives become increasingly relevant as ICA continues its helmsmanship of the communication field, giving ICA a critical role to play in policy about communication in both its academic and applied dimensions. This task force continues an effort set in place by former ICA President Sonia Livingstone, who charged the task force with addressing the linkages between ICA and those engaged in media and communication policy. This year the policy task force is also considering the question of fair use in response to an ad hoc committee of ICA members that formed as a result of a Chicago preconference. Under the task force's guidance, the committee will be conducting a survey of members about fair use practices on its way to establishing a code of best practices in fair use. That code will hopefully be submitted by the task force to the ICA board in Singapore.

ICA panel at IAMCR
Other activities in addition to task forces also help establish ICA's identity and visibility, and to that end I'd like to note the remarkable panel of ICA scholars who took part in an IAMCR panel in Mexico City this past July on the IAMCR theme, "Human Rights and Communication."  Convened as part of a joint effort between ICA and IAMCR that makes it possible for  members of each association to present a panel on the theme of the other's conference, the panel tackled the various dimensions of human rights, writ globally. Chaired by me, the panel featured Rob Huesca (Trinity U) on "Workers' Rights in the Age of 'Free Trade',"  Toby Miller (UC Riverside) addressing "Human Rights and International Sport," Lisa Brooten (Southern Illinois U) talking about "Human Rights and Communication in Southeast Asia," Susana Kaiser (U of San Francisco) on "Argentine Human Rights Activists' Media," and Cees Hamelink (U of Amsterdam) addressing "Hate Speech: Not a Human Rights Violation." The presentations underscored the degree to which human rights violations permeate our social lives across an alarming range of explicit and implicit circumstances, and they generated a useful round of engaged conversation about how to recognize and offset them as they unfold.

In my next two columns, I’ll be brainstorming some of the additional ways in which we can respectively do even better in clarifying who we are to each other and to the world. We have come far, but we can do better. And it's my hope as President to facilitate our doing so.