Tips From Previous Chairs

The following tips are provided by previous Area Committee Chairpersons for the benefit of new Chairs:

• If your committee sponsors a workshop, visit the workshop. Ask the workshop leader how things are going. Thank the workshop leader for his/her time and effort. —Nancy Moreau
  
• Keep an accurate list of committee members' addresses (mail and electronic) and phone numbers. Keep an accurate list of friends of your committee and their addresses. Include them in any mailings to the committee. A committee needs more members than those officially designated to get the work done. —John Hubisz
  
• It's great to get minutes out right away, but that is not always possible. Late minutes and time lag between official meetings result in forgetting what went on before. It often wastes the time at the beginning of the meeting reminding people or just bringing those who were absent up-to-date. Use your agenda to send out the minutes. Use one style of print for the agenda items and another style for what took place when acting on or discussing that item. Additional items that came up would just be appended. —John Hubisz
  
• If you need help for a particular meeting where a local individual might be invaluable, look in the membership directory under state and city. —John Hubisz
  
• New members need to be brought up to speed. Do you have a history of your activities? Paper titles, minutes, brochures, and so on, will ensure that each new member and other interested parties will receive a consistent picture of your committee's activities rather than take a chance with an off-the-cuff, fallible, five-minute conversation. —John Hubisz
  
• By visiting each workshop sponsored by your committee, you can inquire whether the workshop leader would be interested in offering the workshop at a future meeting. Often workshop leaders who offer a workshop at the winter meeting want to offer it again at the next winter meeting and do not attend the summer meeting. By inquiring early, you could line up your workshops early. —Nancy Moreau
  
• Make copies of everything turned into the Executive Office related to your program requests. Have other members fill out session request forms and give them to you with a copy. —Chuck Robertson
  
• In committee meetings, hold a brainstorming session to generate ideas for future invited paper sessions. Get names of possible speakers for each topic. For each suggested topic assign a committee member to organize a session. —Richard Christman
  
• Send minutes of committee meeting to committee members and other attendees. During most committee meetings questions will arise about AAPT procedural matters and ideas will be proposed to import the running of AAPT. Report these to the appropriate AAPT officers on the disposition in the minutes. —Richard Christman
  
• Encourage former members of the committee to attend the meetings. Ask their advice. Involve them in the discussion. Assign them tasks. —Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr.
  
• Find out in advance how many members will be attending the meeting. Don't be in the position of finding out experimentally, as I did, that only one other member of the committee would be attending. —Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr.
  
• Keep in communication with the members of your committee. Soon after the national meeting, send out the minutes of the meeting so they can start to work on ideas generated during the committee meeting. I have written four or five circular letters to the committee members as chair. Some of these were used to prepare the members for the meeting. Others were used to disseminate information which had become available since the last meeting. I asked the members to comment by letter, phone, and e-mail on the ideas I raised in the letters. In short, try to keep as many members as you can working during the time intervals between meetings. —unattributed
  
• More tips from John Safko
• More tips from Diandra Leslie-Pelecky