AIAA SF Council Meeting Minutes Tuesday November 23, 2004
Council Members in Attendance: Chair: Prasada Rao Gogineni Vice-chair: Rick Kwan Secretary: Eric Mueller Webmaster: Corwin Lakin Membership Director: Stephanie Gregg Career Enhancement Director: Bruno Geoffrion Honors and Awards Director: Fanny Zuniga
Meeting Start: 5:45 pm Meeting End: 7:15 pm
Reviewed last meeting's minutes: Section awards announced: total awards $900 Funding for MathCounts deferred for 2004, but potentially available 2005. Proposal to give new members a free first dinner meeting was approved. The Explorer School kickoff at Juanita's elementary school was a success. Web-responsible council members met and made some important decisions about how to grant access to the officers that require it. A discussion about starting essays or contributing thoughts about getting venture capital folks interested in the aerospace industry in silicon valley generated interest but no concrete plans.
RAC Meeting Attended by Chairperson (Prasad): I attended the RAC meeting on Oct 9, 2004, in El Segundo. About 13 people attended. Ten sections were represented. They are Antelope Valley, China lake, Los Angeles, Orange County, Phoenix, San Diego, San Fernando Valley, San Francisco, San Gabriel Valley, and Utah. 5 Deputy Directors were present. They are for Honor and Awards, Membership, Precollege Outreach, Public Policy, and Technical Activities.
Other Important Issues Brought up by Chairperson a. Student Paper Conference is on 3/31 – 4/02 at Cal Poly, San Louis Obispo. They need judges. Technical content could be judged on line from the website. Also, need judges on site to judge presentations. Sign up on line from the website. b. SF Insurance payment was received late. (due Aug 1). Fill a form on the website that would allow deduction from the rebate money we receive for awards. c. Special service citations (max 2) are due by ? d. TC nominations – Nov 1 deadline. Know your TC members. Counts for annual report evaluation. e. Educator Associates are dropping. We get notice 2 months before expiration. Contact them for renewal. The EA's only pay to get the Aerospace America magazine, they don't pay membership dues so this should be a good selling point. f. Chair to give access to all the officers so that they can enter their reports on the National website. This has been done already. The login for the website is "MyAIAA", and entering information in the national website is important because it is one of the criteria by which we are judged at the end of the year for section awards. It is uncertain whether only the officers can enter information, or whether it is open to all council members. g. Next RLC conferences: 2005 Tucson, 2006 Sacramento, 2007 Cincinnati h. Next RAC meeting: Jan 29, 2005, Salt Lake City i. The total award money, with rebates, from the section awards is about $1300.
Programs Calendar Dinner meetings are finally being announced in Ames Centerwide Email - this is a good sign and will hopefully increase our attendance. The February meeting will be a tour of the United Maintenance Facility at SFO, potentially on the 25th, 11th, or 17th, starting at about 3:30. A dinner at a local restaurant will follow (details TBD). The March dinner meeting speaker may be Michael Green from NASA's Exploration Systems: Fanny is inviting him but there is no official confirmation he will be able to do it yet. The May meeting is with a Distinguished Lecturer (who we have not yet selected), and the April meeting needs a speaker.
Special Event: Sally Ride Festival at Stanford on Sunday Oct. 17. Summary from Rick Kwan and Prasad Gogineni: Rick Kwan and Prasad Gogineni, set up the AIAA booth. The booth looked good. We took a digital picture. The AIAA national has sent a box of giveaways. It contained balsa gliders, foam cutout of Shuttle and tattoo stickers. All of which were a great hit with the customers. It was satisfying to see that they were trying them right away in the lawns/openspaces in front of us. I recommend that we participate every year in this event. We met a manager from United airlines maintenance facility who offered our members a tour of their facility. This was done about 10 years ago and was a successful one. We are going to do it again this year. (see the above "Programs Calendar"). On a similar note Fanny mentioned a Sally Ride Science Competition that the section could help sponsor. We would provide money, advise, materials and travel needs for a team of students. Fanny will look into the required commitment for this.
Council Member's Reports
Treasurer NASA finally sent us a check for $6000 to cover their commitments on last June's banquet. Otherwise everything is straightforward.
Vice Chair Rick is going to check on whether HR3752 is still moving through congress. Latest update: 3752 is dead, but a similar bill (number unknown) is much closer to actually being passed.
Membership Invitations were sent to all the new members about the free first dinner meetings. Membership continues to increase in the section, but numbers of attendees at section activities is decreasing. The recently reported large jump in new members for this month may be because the first year of professional membership is free (student upgrades went from 58 to 84). Perhaps this is the time of year when those students graduating get placed into the new professional category.
Pre-College More teachers are needed to request engineers for an hour-long teaching session. Many engineers have volunteered to teach, but there are not enough places for them. While Juanita claims not to have any desire to leave the council in the short term, it was suggested that she should start mentoring a replacement because she has so much wisdom accumulated in this position.
Education Happy hours sponsored by the Stanford section of AIAA are being held every other Friday in the basement of the Durand building there. This is a relatively cheap and popular program, and should be expanded to other schools, particularly Berkeley.
Career Enhancement It was realized that National does many of the career listing activities that we were considering (resume suggestions, job postings, etc.) There may instead be a niche for us to do this in local ads, and leave the resume activities to National because they have more efficient methods of collecting postings and keeping updated with members' email addresses. A full page ad in our newsletter costs companies $400, and we would benefit (along with our section membership) by letting more companies know about this service. Prasad suggested a resume-writing workshop, and Stephanie knows a person who would be a good leader for this. Might be a good activity to do in connection with SJSU.
Evolution of Flight We need to find some closure on this one. Or open it back up and continue interviewing aerospace pioneers. The Ames Multimedia department should have a copy of the latest version of the DVD - we should get a hold of this.
Web Minutes and the agenda for the meeting are posted in the "Files" section of the website. You can link to the page from the "Calendar." The date for January's dinner meeting needs to be posted on the website. Corky is also trying to get other council members access to the website so the burden of keeping the web up to date is shared. WinSCP shareware can be used to upload documents and make changes - contact Corky about the specifics.
Miscellaneous: Only about 10 people have been at each of the last 2 dinner meetings, and we lost $100 at the last one. There was talk about having dinner meetings only every other month, but a decision on that was withheld until the attendance at the upcoming meetings is known.
The national president, Don Richardson, has ideas about how to improve section participation and would be willing to come talk to either the council or to a wider meeting of the membership. The question here was whether he would attract a large turnout himself, or whether only those already engaged in the section would be drawn to hear the president of the Institute. One suggestion was to do a brown bag lunch with him to discuss our "strategic direction." Or perhaps he could be invited to give a talk at a membership drive at either Lockheed or NASA Ames. Prasad said he would check with Liz Carter on this.
Stephanie said she will make a histogram of section members' interests (based on what they fill out on their applications) so that we can try to offer speakers who would attract the largest turnout. Another way to do this might be to align our speakers with the strategic directions of the largest aerospace employers in this area (NASA and Lockheed) because in the end that may be what interests our members the most, especially in terms of future job opportunities.
It was proposed that we organize an SBIR workshop by contacting the government office responsible for such things and doing advertising in this area. We could then invite our membership specifically, which could be very useful to them in a number of ways (encouraging entrepreneurship, potential job offerings, etc.).
Next council meeting: February 2, 2005 Next dinner meeting: December 7, 2004.