>> Ed Perkins: Good afternoon. We're going to talk about IEEE vTools, kind of an overview of
them all. VTools is about providing tools for the volunteers and staff who are supporting the
members. IEEE is based upon volunteers. Without the volunteers doing activities there
wouldn't be much to IEEE. This is really true with the local level. Volunteers are very busy.
They don't have a lot of time available to do things, so the idea of the vTools is to provide useful
tools for the volunteers to be using to make their job easier at the local level. We'll see the
kinds of tools there are. VTools is using the best available technology and it's a partnership
between volunteers and staff and they are mostly look as services. They are looking like a
service provider, like a cloud-based application, if you will. VTools is on the website
here@sites.IEEE.org/vTools and you go to this landing page and I'll do a little bit of a live demo
in a bit. As you can see here you've got quick links to the different kinds of tools and I'll get into
those in a minute. Across the top you can find out about the different they call them products.
There are tutorials available. There is a blog and there is a way to put in a bug report if you run
into some kind of problem. Here is sort of an eye chart but I will go through it. There are
vTools meetings which is used for creating meeting eNotices. There is officer reporting, which
is used for reporting changes in your organizational roster like when you elect officers. There is
also a vTool for student branches to report their information. Each year they have to submit a
plan and a report, so this is an online way for them to do that. There is voting. Units are
supposed to have elections every year or every two years and the problem with elections is
how do you do the voting. We now have online voting which makes that process a lot simpler
so people who have e-mail addresses you can create a ballot and have it sent out to them and
then it's a secret ballot, so that's very useful. Web in a Box is a way to make a very simple
website for units that may just need to have their officers listed for contact information and
maybe have some meetings hosted that they are doing. eNotice is a tool to send mailings out
to members. We have a survey tool so this is a fully functional survey tool. It is like where you
go in and it's brain-dead unless you pay the money. It's a full subscription to it.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: eNotice is an IEEE. It is internal. There are some parts of IEEE that have
campaign tools that they use for different things like for member renewals or technical
activities. It since things out. ReviewRoom is another tool that's available. If you have
applications that you want to review, for example, it's used for awards or if you want to
nominate yourself for a committee position, they use ReviewRoom to put those in because it's
a way to handle the review process and things like that. SAMMIEE is the tool for the
membership information and then we have web conference using WebEx so you can request a
WebEx and finally, we have created a thing called the search section vitality dashboard because
in SAMMIEE there are a lot of different things you can individually query, but for say if you are
running a sectionary chapter there is maybe a set of information you need to know, so rather
than having to go in to SAMMIEE and run a whole set of different queries they have created
dashboard that will run all of the queries and display all of them in one place. Tutorials, there
are tutorials. They may not be up-to-date with the latest changes because there are changes
coming from time to time. But there are some PDFs that you can get so there is a PPT or PDF
I'm getting started. There is information about how to use the meetings, the WebInABox, the
voting. There are some presentations about officer reporting and eNotice. There's a thing
about the surveys and the ReviewRoom, how to use WebEx. Doodle, doodle is not a vTool but
it's sort of a recommended tool to use to schedule meetings and the vitality dashboard. Those
are tutorial resources that are available. VTools access is based on your role as a volunteer, so
if you're a section officer or a chapter chair you automatically, and that's why we talk about
reporting to the roster, so when you are reported on the roster then you automatically get
access to the different parts of vTools. It is very important to him for roster changes, because
otherwise, the new chapter chair, if it doesn't get reported won't be able to get into and put a
meeting eNotice up. Additionally, there are requests saying in our section we have a program
sure. We want the program sure to post the meetings in the vTools or the chapter chair
doesn't do that then there is a program person in the chapter. So you can create several, you
can have more than one vTools coordinator position so you can have a chapter can have one.
This section can have one and you can have one. So these people can also have access into
vTools to do different things and some of them you can give them access to meetings are
access to SAMMIEE. How do they do this is a use your IEEE web account, so that's tied back
into your IEEE membership record so that so they can tell what role you've gotten and what you
can do. Yeah?
>>: So if I was going to send out a meeting I would need a password I would use my regular
password?
>> Ed Perkins: If you are going to post a meeting you would login with your web account
password into the vTools meetings and then if you wanted to send it out you would go to
eNotice and if you were coded with the right access to the organization there is an online e-mail
where you can go and you can submit it and have it done online. This is still a manual process.
This staff would do this.
>>: We would do it and then send it to New Jersey and then they would send it out?
>> Ed Perkins: There's an online forum that you can use so you don't have to send it to New
Jersey for it to be all inside the system. They're working on integrating in a way that when you
post a meeting if you check a box and say I want this sent out by eNotice, but that's not
completed yet. That's a long-standing thing that they wanted to do. In order to add these
vTools coordinators, the section officer or the chapter chair or whoever is in charge of the
organization would go to the officer reporting form and if somebody adds somebody in as
vTools coordinator. If the vTools coordinator is not listed there is a box that says request a new
officer position and you can put in vTools coordinator and make them the vTools coordinator.
If you run into some kind of a bug there is a form for that. I'll go online and go through these
later. You get an e-mail about what's happened to your bug request. The reason they want
you to use this is if you send an e-mail to staff and staff has to take your e-mail and then put the
e-mail into the forwarding system and so it's much simpler to do it that way.
>>: But if I just wanted to send it to the PES section, power energy section, is there just a list
server for that?
>> Ed Perkins: It depends. If you're at the section level then there's a way you can specify who
it goes to. I think you could do that. If you are coded for section access then you could send it
to everybody in the section, so you would have to say this should only go to the PES subset.
VTools are partitioned into several areas. The first one is member communications, so this is
how to communicate things to the members. You've got meeting eNotices, putting on the
webpage, getting mailing list, sending an e-mail, things like that. If you are trying to do that
yourself you've got to either get the e-mails from someplace and try to mail out in your
browser, from your own e-mail client and if you're putting a eNotice in the webpage, before
vTools this was sort of a hassle and people had different ways of doing it, so this is a nice
standardized way to do meeting eNotices. This is the category. VTools memory engagements
support, so several of the vTools are here. There is website hosting, which can be WordPress or
Web in a Box so you want to put stuff in about your unit on the web so you might have a
website. There's a meeting. The meeting eNoticed to send the eNotices out because everyone
has to do meeting reports, so the L31s are online and they are tied into the vTools meetings, so
if you put an entry in the vTools meetings when you go to make your L31 up you just go to the
meeting eNotices a I want to be L31 and it fills in half information. You've just got to put in who
came, so it's really simple. There is a product called at meeting which is in development, so
that's if somebody comes to a meeting and wants to register at the meeting, you can have like
an app or something so they can do it right at meeting. And then this SAMMIEE. SAMMIEE is
not a vTool per se but it's used in terms of member engagement. You want to get with some
members and you want to find senior members and you want to find people that could be
senior members and things like that and so it's a way to let you do that. Communications, I
mentioned just a little bit. You have WordPress and we also have Entity Web Hosting 2.0 and
HTML sites are still supported as original in Entity Web Hosting 1.0, although, people are
encouraged to use the WordPress because we saw it's a content management sized and it's a
lot easier to do things than working with HTML pages. But if you got something that just
doesn't work right, you can have HTML. Web in a Box is a script-based thing to create a simple
website. From vTools meetings you can get the meetings for your section and have them show
up in your section's website. They also have online registration and payment and so if you've
got people coming and you have dinner, you can have different registration. You can get feeds
from them for assess feeds and i account feeds that you can put into other calendars. It's going
to be tied into eNotice and that's something that's coming. One requirement this has is that
when there is any meeting in the section of any chapter or any group or the whole section, all
the section member should be notified of all meetings. A lot of chapters tend to be very insular
and they only think about notifying their chapter members, but it's a good thing to let all of the
section members know about meetings and then maybe people who are really interested in the
topic who aren't in the chapter could attend.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: Right. The key thing is to get the chapters to put the messages into meetings
and then…
>>: The meeting doesn't automatically go out.
>> Ed Perkins: It doesn't, but like what we do in our section is every month or a couple of times
a month we go to the meetings and we get a list of all the meetings and then we put that in an
e-mail and send it out to everybody so everybody knows it.
>>: And like young professional. They only send to them so. They don't send to everybody.
>> Ed Perkins: You got even affinity groups. They don't think that they should let everybody
know what's going on. Yeah, that's a requirement in any operations manual, so you can tell
them that that's the operations manual.
>>: Somebody receiving all of these e-mails they can opt out at any time, right?
>> Ed Perkins: If you have eNotice, you can opt out of eNotice. That's the thing that people
were worried about is you may get lots of e-mail all the time. That's why we take all of the
meetings twice a month and send it out rather than every time there's a thing you get an email. Then if we are having some kind of an event and we are trying to send reminders every
week, we eNoticed that the people that are signing off the website, off the mailing list keeps
going up because people don't want to keep getting all these e-mails. So there is a happy
medium that you have to come up with.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: We can talk about that but it's not considered a vTool. That's what you can do.
You can also create a list server and have your own mailing list and then you can send out
whenever you want to do that. Essential services are that you really need to do is you need to
have some presence on the web. You need to have your meeting eNotices and your L 31
reports and eNotice or some other way to notify people. Those are the essential services. Web
hosting has WordPress. There are branded templates for the sites. There's HTML as I
mentioned. There's Web in a Box. There's a wizard, so you don't really need a webmaster. You
go online and fill out a form and automatically produces a page that has all of your officers.
When you report them online it goes in the database and it pulls the officers out of the
database and displays a little table and then takes the feed from the meetings and displays that
in another page so that you can just do this once and as long as the officers got reported and
they put their meetings in vTools people will go to their site and they would see who the
officers are and what the latest meetings are. It's a very low maintenance kind of thing for like
a chapter that doesn't want to do more than that. If you want to have more content and more
things to get more people coming to the website that's why you would use like a WordPress
and things like that. Here's the web hosting. Here's where you go to request a site. There's the
four types. Virtual hosting, I'll get into that, is if you have a domain already in you want to
attach that to your IEEE site. There's a request form for if you want to request a WordPress
site. Web in a Box, we talked about this. There's a wizard kind of interface that doesn't require
webmaster. IEEE database provides the list of officers and the list of meetings. Here's an
example of Web in a Box. This is Pike's Peak section, so you type in a welcome text on the
form, so there is a welcome text thing. There's an RSS feed for announcements so people can
subscribe to an RSS feed from the site for any of these things that are being posted. There's a
calendar, officer roster, other units, so they have chapters and the chapters can be listed in
there. If they have uploaded any files those can be there as well. This is very simple. Web in a
Box under section meeting it shows the future 90 days, so three months in advance it'll show
you what's coming up. If you have a WordPress site there's a calendar plug in that you can use
a calendar feed and you can show all the meetings in the calendar. Or there's another way if
we can actually show all of the meetings in another format and so there are couple of ways that
you can do that.
>>: Any section can open one, like the Seattle section here? Do we have one?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah. The Seattle section has a, they don't have Web in a Box but they have
WordPress, I believe.
>>: [indiscernible]
>>: Where was I? Yeah, meetings. Meetings has a feature where you can go online. You can
do registration and you can do electronic payment in regions one through seven because that's
the credit card processing system that we have which is basically North America. Getting
money out of Europe and Asia is more difficult so that I have that. There are several kinds of
feeds. We'll see that later. You can use an iCal feed and import that into WordPress, into a
plug-in in WordPress. When you figure out the meeting, your L 31 is already got your
information about when was the meeting, who were the speakers. There's an option in the
meetings thing where you can print a check in roster and you can also print meal tickets. You
can have several types of registrations as well. If you had a small workshop and you wanted to
run it a half a day or a day long workshop you could use the vTool for registration. You don't
have to use another tool. You can do it all in there. If you are having something that you are
charging for, the payment goes into your concentration bank account. If you don't log into
vTools meetings, this is what you see. Basically, what you can find is meetings and there is
information. Finding meetings, there is a search thing so you can pick out if you are looking out
for technology, for example, or if you are you looking for meetings in a certain region, you put
in the region and then you can select the section and you can select the chapter. If you want to
look for a computer chapter in Los Angeles, then you can say region six, Metro LA or Orange
County, one of the sections around LA and you can say computer society is a pull down and just
show me the meetings. You can look at the ones in the past, the future. You can have a range
of dates, so you can do it very well. I was just checking. There's almost 15,000 meetings in the
database, so filtering is good.
>>: I was just curious, who entered this meeting?
>> Ed Perkins: The Seattle people did.
>>: I did.
>>: This presentation is actually in the vTools in the Seattle section. If you login you are going
to see a whole different set of options. You can schedule a feed. You can look at the feeds.
You can create meeting reports, so there are options that you get. After you are logged in then
it knows your section and your region so now you have options to look at recent meetings,
upcoming meetings, unpublished meetings and so you can have more options if you are logged
in. There are parameters on how you can search and what you put in. Here is an example of a
meeting for New Hampshire. For those of you who might be familiar with the older version of
vTools meetings, they have recently upgraded and updated it and it looks a lot better. It now
has HTML by default. Before it was either text or if you wanted to do HTML it was really hard.
And then they also organized the information so it's a lot easier to see. Before you had to go
down a long way to figure out where was then when I started and now it's all nicely organized.
That's an improvement. You see there is a button therefore registration. Now they have a real
editor. If you're familiar with a system like WordPress where you can type things in and you
can make things bold and you can add links and all of that kind of stuff, so the is much nicer for
putting meetings into then it used to be. You need to put in event title, category and a
description and keywords and those are required for the L 31 report. If you are putting in a
meeting, L 31, for a meeting that wasn't in vTools you need to give it a title, category,
description and some keywords. The other thing now is you want to know whether you are
going to invite students are not. That's basically for the L 31 report because it wants to know
our students being invited to these. We should invite students to the section meetings if they
can come because we want them to find out what do professionals really do and things like
that. You put in a start time and the end time for the meeting and if you are using the
registration system you want to know when does registration start and when does registration
end. Also the time zone. You have a thing where you can put where it is. You can have a
building and they will number or a name of the company, an address, city, county, state. You
even have a map URL, so if you have a Google map you can paste that in and it'll put up a map.
If you know the longitude and latitude for GPS you can put those in. These are the other ones
that have to be put in for the L 31, when it was and then you need to put in the region section.
In this case, this is an example from Oregon. If you have cosponsors, so let's say you are doing
something with the ACM or the ASME you can put that in there. And you need a contact e-mail
so if somebody has a question about the meeting they can send an e-mail to somebody. The
next part is you want to find out if you are going to charge for admission or not. If you're going
to charge for admission another section is going to come into where you have to define what all
of the fees are going to be.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: All of these features, the headers and footers have been there. I have never
used them myself. I'm not sure where they go over what they do, but obviously, what you do is
you put something in there and you see what it looks like. Then there is a survey URL and I
suspect if you wanted to have some kind of survey associated with the meeting. Now that we
have the fluid surveys you could go there and create a survey and put it in. I'm not sure if that's
pre or post. There are some new buttons down here. You can publish it. You can indicate that
it is remotely accessible, which means that you're going to have a web access or some kind of
thing broadcasting the meeting. If you have to cancel a meeting you can edit the form and click
the cancel button and it will come up and say canceled in the listing so everyone will know that
the meeting has been canceled. If you have menu selections if you are having food, then you
can find what the menu selections are. At the end you say create to create the meeting. It'll
run through it and it'll check to make sure that all of the required fields are there and if
required fields I'm sure it will tell you and it will come back and you can fix that. If you edit a
meeting then there will be a form done here that will say update. The create will change to
update. Another thing you can do is if you have an existing meeting you can view that. Let's
say you always have the chapter meetings on the third chapter of the month at Microsoft. You
could bring up the last month's meeting and say I want to create the meeting from an existing
meeting, so then all of the location, all of that information will be there and you just have to
replace the title and the speaker and that description, but all of the information about the
address and the map and if you have any of that kind of stuff you can just reuse it. You don't
have to type it in over and over again.
>>: I have a quick question about WebEx. With WebEx you don't have to record the seminar.
It goes to WebEx and that's it.
>> Ed Perkins: You have to fill out the L 31 for every meeting.
>>: But then the WebEx does it?
>> Ed Perkins: You can record or not record on the WebEx.
>>: And that's an extra expense, right?
>> Ed Perkins: No. WebEx is provided by IEEE. IEEE has a WebEx account and currently we
don't have to pay for using it.
>>: WebEx doesn't need to schedule a meeting, right? You just go in and do it?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah, but you only would use WebEx if let's say you had the meeting and you
wanted to broadcast the meeting by WebEx for people remotely. This doesn't schedule a
WebEx. You just put a button box on here. This would be if somebody is searching for
remotely accessible meetings they might find one.
>>: So the remote access button, we check it?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah. You check it. It's just a flag for the meeting information that is remotely
accessible. It doesn't schedule WebEx. You have to go do that.
>>: You have to do it independently?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah.
>>: Sometimes I ask for the video two weeks and if they don't make the meeting people say
can you send me this WebEx.
>> Ed Perkins: Good somebody wants to think about the recording, you have to set up the
recording yourself. There's no automatic recording thing.
>>: So that doesn't store someplace where somebody that doesn't make the meeting can click
on it?
>>: I don't know what WebEx does with storing things when you can record things. I don't
know if it records that locally or it records it and then you've got to figure out where to put the
WebEx and things like that. We're trying to get into this technology and certainly in region six
we're working with being able to record chapter meetings. We have given sections equipment
where they can go out and do that, because that's a real need, because it's hard to drive across
town to get to meetings in traffic jams and stuff like that, so we're trying to make things more
accessible to people. Here are the feeds. The first thing you get is you go in and use your L 31
reports. I'm not sure why that's first because normally I'm not interested in looking at the L
31s; I want to look at the meetings, but if I scroll down you get to the meeting a list of the
meeting feeds. These are URLs that you can use in RSS or whatever to access the feeds. For
example, in region six you can get L 31s, you can get an RSS feed or XML feed for any of these.
You can get them at the region level or the section level. You can get them at the chapter level,
computer chapter or you can get them at from an OU level. You can get each kind of
organizational unit that you can have a meeting you can get the RSS feed for that.
>>: Is this to get L 31 here.
>> Ed Perkins: This is to look at them through an RSS feed.
>>: So RSS feed to L 31?
>> Ed Perkins: From, this is from. I am not sure why you would want an RSS feed of the L 31,
but it's available. If you want to do the meetings which is more interesting, what are the
upcoming meetings, those come in more formats. You can get an RSS feed, HTML, XML or you
can get iCal which is a calendar format for putting into a counter. As before, you can get all
these variations, region, region section level; you can get them chapter level and infinity group
level, so anything that is a recognized organizational unit that the section has when you went in
to create the meeting and you put in region, section and what unit is. You can get feeds out for
each of those and what activities are coming up.
>>: Remind us how to set this iCal to [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: There is a way that you can put the iCal.
>>: Is there a way that you can get the URLs?
>> Ed Perkins: Each of these are links and there is a URL there and you can put that in. If you
are importing a calendar into WordPress, you would get this link, this iCal link and you would
put that in that here is where the information is coming from.
>>: You at it forever so you don't need to do it again?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah. This doesn't change. This just goes for whatever is coming up you can see
there.
>>: So it's not like this iCal is when you click you are putting it in working for ever. Any meeting
that comes up will sync over there?
>> Ed Perkins: Yes. These URLs don't change. They're not going to change. Next month it's not
going to be a different URL. The content will be different as you'll see that the URL will be the
same. In virtual meetings you get by an RSS feed. That's why they have that checkbox so now
you can get a feed that's only all be virtual meetings. I go on and on the website like in the
region level we can see the list of all the virtual meetings that are coming up in region six for
people to look at that they could do remotely from Italy or India if they wanted to.
>>: So it has the certain time and day?
>> Ed Perkins: You would get the information about the meeting and you would go in you
could register for it and I don't know, they could have changed the registration and say I'm
attending virtually or something like that so the people would know that people are going to
attend virtually. I'm not sure if they've done that already or not.
>>: I see them with the person on and then I see them with just PowerPoint.
>> Ed Perkins: There are multiple ways you can do that depending on the bandwidth.
Obviously, if you are you sending video remotely that's a much higher bandwidth than if you
are sending audio and having an audio conference.
>>: If I put these things in our website in other section or all region six for some sort and so
anything happen with virtual meeting the icon will be input it so we can click it and see like a
meeting in India? Is that right?
>> Ed Perkins: This is only region six. If you wanted India you would have to go to region 10.
>>: Okay. For example, does that mean that if there are any meetings like Intel let's say have a
virtual meeting? And so I can just put this in our Seattle section website so anyone could click
on it?
>> Ed Perkins: If you know of some company that is having a virtual broadcast of something
and you want to make your members aware of it you can list that in your meetings for your
section saying this is available. You could do that.
>>: How do I put it in there so that people can just click it and see it?
>> Ed Perkins: You would put the URL because now when you create the meeting, since you
can now have a real editor, you can put a URL in there and say this is a virtual meeting hosted
for Microsoft or Intel. Maybe they are having a developer forum and they have a keynote or
something so you could put that in and people could click there and they could go to that.
>>: Maybe you can show us a little bit after.
>> Ed Perkins: We'll see if we get some time left we could play around with that. The nice thing
about eNotice is that it is based on the current active members. The drawback to eNotice is
that it's based on the current active members, so if you wanted to have maybe you keep your
members and have them renewed and you would like to keep sending them little reminders to
make them feel guilty of all of the stuff that they are missing because they didn't renew their
IEEE membership, you are not going to get that through eNotice. You are just going to get the
current people. The good thing about eNotice is if somebody says I don't want e-mail then
when they extracted out those people's e-mails are not in the list. You may end up with a
situation that in your section level if you got an extract out of SAMMIEE for the membership list
and you loaded it up and you are sending this stuff and it's three years later and the guy
dropped his IEEE membership and you don't know he has dropped his IEEE membership he is
still in your list. He might send you a note and say why am I still getting this stuff. And you
would want to take him out of the list.
>>: Who will monitor this, the Seattle webmaster?
>> Ed Perkins: eNotice is automatic. You don't have to do anything. You request an eNotice
and the staff takes care of it for you. If you create your own lister then periodically you need to
login to SAMMIEE to find out when did you last get the list, who has moved into your section,
who has joined in your section since then and you would need to add them. Is it better you just
pull down the list of everybody and just replace it, however you want to do that. The thing with
eNotice is let's say that you have got some people at companies that may or may not be
members but you want to send the eNotices that you are having these meetings so that maybe
they could send that around internally to their employees. If they are not members than they
are not in eNotice and you are not going to be able to do that. But eNotice is very convenient.
You always get the latest current membership that you've got. You don't have to pull all this
other stuff, SAMMIEE or any of that. The staff pulls the list out of SAMMIEE, which is why it
takes five days to do an eNotice because a lot of people want to send eNotices and so there is a
backlog in the queue. The staff says other things are supposed to do and so that's why they say
that it could take like five days to get it sent out. Here is the new eNotice system for online. Up
to five business days. This is not for conferences so if you are doing a conference, so if you are
a society doing a conference this is not a tool for that. There is another mechanism to do that.
For your section doing a conference, that's one thing, but if you are a computer society where
the power engineering society who is doing some kind of meeting, they have their own system
for doing that.
>>: GHCC has their own list server.
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah GHCC, for example is a region conference and we have a list serve. We
have an interest list. There is a form on the website and people who want to sign up on the
interest list to want to be notified when we send stuff out. That is somewhat different than the
regular eNotice. What we do for that is every time we put the conference on behalf of the list
of people who came and we put them into the interest list. Overtime you build up several
thousand people in the interest list. The nice thing about that is those people actually came to
your event who have an interest in your event who would be more interested in finding out
about stuff that you're doing. One thing that has been suggested and I don't know if people do
it or not, was that when you have the registration for your meetings and virtual meetings is you
get the e-mail addresses of people who came and if people aren't members and they come
more than two or three times, you say hey. I see you're coming to our meeting every month.
You might want to consider joining IEEE or you add them to the list of people being notified
about the meetings. This is a slide that I did. Depending on what role you have, you see who
you can send to. In this case I happen to have a role with the Nanotechnology Council, so I can
send stuff to the Nanotechnology Council. I can send to that list. These are all of the notices I
sent out. I also have a role in the chapter of a chapter secretary, so I can send things to the
chapter as well.
>>: You can click on that and it will tell you who attended, right?
>> Ed Perkins: It's right here. There is the target OU. The target OU is the Nano 42, so my
computer would be C 16, so it would say C 16 and I have access to region and section and also
coded as access for the Nanotechnology Council so I can do this, which has turned out to be
very useful.
>>: It's just a fact check to make sure that you are going to the right people?
>> Ed Perkins: There are only certain units you can send to.
>>: The people in that, do you know who they are?
>> Ed Perkins: No. I don't know who they are. In this case I'm sending all the members in the
Nanotechnology Council. Periodically, we send them an update. What I could do is I could go
and I could pull all the members out and I could make a list serve, but every month at the
Nanotechnology Council we get two or 300 join and we just want to send them to the current
members because this is information about the Council and conferences and things that are
coming up. In that case whoever the current people are is fine.
>>: The reason I ask is because I get like a gazillion e-mails from IEEE and I am not related to
power.
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah everybody gets lots of e-mails from IEEE.
>>: What I'm getting at is that people get so bombarded with this stuff they just ignore
everything.
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah, some people do. I have actually subscribed to a bunch of the e-mails from
IEEE, so spectrum has an interest list then we have technical communities now that you can
subscribe to like there is a cyber security, internet of things, smart grid, all the stuff. I just put a
filter in and filtering it. It's easy to do. Here I want to create an eNotice. Here, for example, the
person doing this has access to the computer chapter in the Oregon section. Here's a subject.
You want to change a subject because otherwise it's going to be eNotice 1986 and everybody is
going to be going what the heck is eNotice 1986. You pick who you are going to. Are you going
to go to the entire Oregon section? In this case, I know the person who did this has a role at
the section level and also at the chapter level, so he can either send to the whole section or he
can send just to the chapter. Does he want to send to all of the members, just student
members, just a senior members? Does he want to send it to active members? Do you want to
have a reminder? When I send the eNotice out in the meeting is in three weeks, and another
week do you want to have a reminder e-mail go out? So you can have a reminder go out, which
is a very useful function. You have a reply to so you can put a place if somebody wants to reply
to the message. Special requests, so you can put this into the administrator that I need to have
this sent out before Friday, or something like that. If you want to have an attachment with a
PDF thing, you can put in an attachment. Then you have the regular editor down here where
we saw with the meeting eNotice where you can put in HTML. You can put it links and you can
format it and make it look nice.
>>: You said five days what if you have a shorter time. Is there any way you can bypass?
>> Ed Perkins: You can request it faster. If you have critical eNotices, priority critical, so if you
had to cancel a meeting, for example, you might want to send an e-mail eNotice out and tell
people the meeting has been canceled.
>>: What happened to me is I tried to make the whole eNotice is done, spent hours and then
when I want to send something it just keep on having a response that says it takes five days. I
see that I can even submit, so that happened for this event. I spent all day long and created the
e-mails but if within five days it wouldn't even let me, five business days it wouldn't let me
submit it just keeps on coming back says remember this business meeting takes five business
days. How can I bypass that?
>> Ed Perkins: Select priority critical.
>>: I did.
>> Ed Perkins: Okay. Basically, if you're <days from the meeting it won't let you schedule the
eNotice because it might come out after the meeting so it won't let you do that. So there is a
minimum of five days before that you have to send the eNotice out.
>>: Yes. It wouldn't let me.
>> Ed Perkins: That's a good thing to know that you can only send an eNotice over five days
from your event because they check. If day minus day is less than five days they won't accept
it. Okay. eMeeting activity reports are required and you need to file those and you have to
have at least two or three meetings here for each chapter. If there are no L 31s from your
chapter that you go on the watch list because they assume you are inactive. If you are having
meetings you have to file the L 31 reports. It also figures into your rebate, if your chapter is an
active than the section won't get a rebate based on the number of members in the chapter.
The other thing is how many meetings, how much activity you have goes into a database and
you do this section vitality, one of the things you can see there is how many meetings did each
of these units have in the thing. We talked about this. If you have a meeting eNotice already,
and I talked about if you want to clone the meeting eNotice you can go there. You can look at
the meeting statistics, which is basically how many people are registered or you can create the
L 31 report. After your meeting comes in, you can log into the meetings. You bring up your
meeting. You go down to the bottom and he said I want to create the L 31 report. Basically,
you go in and you fill in the attendance. All of this information should have all been prepopulated from the meeting eNotice already, so you are going to have to do that. The speaker
information should have already been pre-populated so you just have to fill in two numbers,
how many members came and how many nonmembers came and submit and you are done, so
it's very simple if you have used the meeting system to report your meetings.
>>: If you were taking this for PDH credits would that be on there?
>> Ed Perkins: No. They don't have anything in here that has anything to do with whether you
are offering PDHs or not.
>>: But you said the number of members?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah, the number of IEEE members who came.
>>: So what makes them know that somebody attended? They fill out the little form?
>> Ed Perkins: The meetings will produce a sign in sheet, so you can take that to your meeting
and have people sign in. Other times what we have done is we say how many people are
members and they raise their hand and we go around and we say about 25. You look around
and you say well we have about 45 people here and so we estimate because sometimes it's
hard with a sign in sheet to get everybody to sign it. But we usually try to get a show of hands
or account or something to get an idea of how many people and what percentage are members
and nonmembers. It's pretty amazing that they had all the statistics up on how many meetings
a run and how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people come to these meetings. It's
pretty amazing. atMeetings is a new thing. It's on-site registration with or without internetaccess so that you can get an idea if people should walk in. If you have a meeting and 30
people were preregistered you go to the meeting and half of them don't show, but then 10
other people walk in and you don't know who they are, so if you want to have them register, or
especially if you are charging them five bucks for the food or something like that, so now you
can have an on-site registration. You can also find out if the attendees are new members.
Have they just become a senior member? Are they first-time attendees? And there are other
kinds of metrics you might be able to get out of this, but this is in development so I don't have
any information exactly what the specs are. The next thing we need to do is you have to collect
and report officers. One very important thing is if the person is not a member they can't run for
office, so if people forget to renew and you go to report them in the roster and you wonder
why they are not in the roster, well maybe because they haven't renewed their membership
when they reported. When you put people in and make these ballots you need to know their
membership number and it'll go into real time and say is this person an active member or not
an active member. You can create the ballots and you can then select automatically a list of all
of the e-mails of all the members of the chapter of the section and they will get e-mailed a
ballot and they go in and they can vote and then you can get a report on the votes and then you
know who won your election. It's very nice online and you don't have to worry. Before it was
like okay. We are going to mail postcards out to everybody and then we've got to get them
back and how are we going to count them and it's like too much work. We would have a
section meeting and 40 people would show up and say who is running for such and such. We
had announced it was going to be an election meeting. And whoever shows up and by hands
who once this person then who once this person. Okay. We did the election but the whole
idea of doing a real quote unquote real election is just so cumbersome, but now we have the
online ballots and there's really no excuse not to have an election that all of the members can
vote in.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah. You have to be a member. It checks. There are three things that are
required for that. Obviously the voting application, the officer reporting, so you know who the
officers are and the student branch reporting. These are administrative services. We have
online voting, officer reporting and section vitality dashboard. This is another category of
vTools services, administrative. We talked about the voting. It's SSL. You have to have a web
account to login and vote, so it's controlled. You can't rig the election. Sections, chapters and
affinity groups are supported. Because it's secure you know you have a good election. Ballot
dashboard, so you are in a section. You can have a template if you want to use a template. It
shows you your old ballots, saved ballots, past ballots, so you can create a new ballot. You
need the name of the ballot, the time zone, open and closing, so you need to have the kinds
obviously, because 12 AM in the Pacific is different than 12 AM in East. Then there's some
boilerplate in here that you just modify it. Welcome to the ballot, the election and then select
one candidate and the candidate's you enter them all into the database as well, so it makes it
relatively simple to do. They want the member number for the candidates so they can verify if
they are actually a valid member. The first name, last name and so then you ask the candidate
to have a position statement. What positions have I held in IEEE? What am I going to do? Why
should you vote for me? You got up to 4000 characters for that. If you are running for higher
office like a regional director there is a format that they use for filling out the forms. If you
want to become a committee member you might get one of those and suggest that people
have some certain things so it is basically easy to compare between people. Then you can load
the voters in. Here is your OU. You put your web account password in there. I'm not sure
where you get that. Then you can automatically get the voter list uploaded.
>>: Question, if I wanted to send about for society, like computer society or something in
Seattle section, so the OU, what I need is a computer society's number? How does that work?
>> Ed Perkins: You would go back here and you would select the organization and so I suspect
if you did the pull down here it would say Seattle section computer society and then you would
go through filling out everything. You would get down here and would say the OU, and then
you would put in your, I presume this is, somewhere in here it's got to know. Because you are
logged in under your web account, so then when you get down here you've got quick password
in again and then it will automatically go to the database. Before what you had to do is you had
to go to SAMMIEE and do a query and save a list and then bring list over and upload the list and
that has been eliminated. You can clear the voter list so I guess if you do it and you realize that
you screwed something up you can clear it out and do it again. Or you can have a custom list.
You can save it as a draft or you can save it as a real ballot. Officer reporting is online. It
validates are you a member or not, so active member. When you submit it it goes live
immediately. Before you used to have some form that you failed out and sometime later the
staff would get to it and do that. We've got 300 sections, the couple of thousand chapters,
3000 student branches and how many affinity groups? That's a lot. That's too much data for
common it would be like the IRS at tax time. You would have a bank of people typing stuff in
and this way you can have it done automatically online. You select your organizational unit.
You pick your officer. This is for Oregon section. eNotice here is a vTools coordinator and you
can have multiple people in there. Or you can request a new officer position and so if you have
a program chair you can say we have a guy that has now been elected to program chair. You
can add them in. You can vacate the position. You can say the webmaster moved and so you
can click on that, vacate and then it's gone. The way IEEE works is if you don't go in and vacate
the name or replace it by somebody else, they assume that person is still in that role, so it could
be 25 years later and Fred is still the webmaster of the Oregon section and even though he
retired because nothing has been reported to change that. It's important that you go in and
make sure that people who are no longer doing stuff are removed from doing things and the
right people are in. Especially if you had a membership chair and the guy moved away and you
didn't replace him or vacate it and they are sending kits out, they are sending kits out to
wherever this guy lives now instead of to you.
>>: Whose responsibility would that be? The webmaster?
>> Ed Perkins: It is probably up to the section secretary to go in and update the roster. That
should be a role for the section secretary. Section vitality database, this just using the
SAMMIEE data and the data warehouse. There is a tutorial here. It has a bunch of queries, but
SAMMIEE is not running today. It's being updated. Otherwise I would have shown you the
vitality dashboard. I have some slides that I'll use. Here is the vitality data. You go to your
section. You select your region and your section. If you are like the region director you can go
in and you can look at all of the sections in the region. But if you are a section sure you are just
going to be able to see your section and you can probably see all of your chapters. If you are a
chapter person you are just going to see your chapter. You are not going to necessarily see
everything else. Here is a count of all the members and they have this nice colorful pie chart, so
if very having trouble. If you can't relate to how much that is versus this, they have a nice pie
chart. It also fills a space that otherwise would be left on the screen because you got the table.
Then you can get a list of all your members. In a section you have all these chapters. This says
active society membership, services whether or not you have a chapter. This is how many
society members who have and it has them by grade. If you've got signal processing society
and you've got 80 people, maybe you should have a chapter. That can help you figure out what
you need to do for that.
>>: How I find out each chapter's list? Like say signal processing society, how do I get the list
office?
>> Ed Perkins: You want to get a list of who is in the signal processing society?
>>: Yes.
>> Ed Perkins: I would have to check. I don't know if you can get that specifically from the
vitality dashboard. You may have to going to SAMMIEE to get an individual chapter list. But it
will give you all the officers. Every officer who has been reported, whatever position they are,
when they started and when they end. If there is no end time the person will continue forever.
The other thing that you'll eNotice is here is your society chapter chairs. We're in the Oregon
section, so we have the chapter chair from Baltimore is in our section. Obviously, they moved
from Baltimore and Baltimore never changed their roster. He lives now in Oregon and so when
we get a report of who in Oregon is the chapter chair. There he is and he is the Baltimore
chapter chair but he is not in Baltimore. Here's somebody who used to be. In this case you say
wait a minute. This person needs to be a chapter chair. Now they live in our section. Maybe
we should ask them to be chapter chair and our section or some officer of the chapter in our
section. Here's somebody who was circuit and system chapter chair in Ontario. Now they are
in our section. Maybe we should approach them and say can you help us with our chapter.
This cuts two ways. You find this with student branches as well. You can find this with affinity
groups. Student branch chapter, so here is the student chair in the University of California
chapter and that's probably because they probably have their home address in Oregon or that's
their preferred address even though they have that role down in California.
>>: On the chapter of the student branch officers, who should update that one?
>> Ed Perkins: That's the responsibility of the student branch people.
>>: In branches they can input their new officers?
>> Ed Perkins: Yes, because they have online reporting as well.
>>: I see. Each chapter has its own online reporting?
>> Ed Perkins: Section, chapter, student branches can file their reports themselves online.
>>: So I can get it from this?
>> Ed Perkins: Yes. You will have a list and an example, in Oregon we have the Seattle student
branch chair because they're obviously are from Oregon or that's the counselor, or they were
reported as the counselor and never replaced as the counselor and they moved. The counselor
move but now he is in Oregon and nobody went in and made the position vacant.
>>: I didn't do it. [indiscernible] they didn't go into do it.
>> Ed Perkins: They probably did. That's probably true. So if somebody is trying to contact him
and says what happened to the chapter. He's going to delete the e-mail because he doesn't do
that anymore. It's just one of the idiosyncrasies of the database. Meeting activity, you can get
all of the different kinds of meeting types. You can go in and you can search for meeting
activity. We had other services that are available which include engaging members. You want
to find out about members, so you have surveys or you want to publish a blog about openings
that are going on and news items for them to find out information or you want to do
conferences, so you have those three things. If you're having nomination reviews or paper
reviews were things like that they have ReviewRooms which can be used for doing stuff like
that. If you are doing a real conference there is conference paper management systems that
are more aimed for that particular niche. If you want to use ReviewRoom you need to send an
e-mail to staff to arrange access. It's not generally available to everybody. Surveys is very
simple. It's online. You can select questions and you can have some logic in there. Every unit
has their own workspace, so Seattle has a workspace, Oregon, the region has a workspace.
There is an RSS feed and we are using a third-party vendor, FluidSurveys. FluidSurveys, by the
way, just thought survey monkey. They were sort of like survey monkey but now survey
monkey is combined. Here's the dashboard. You go in and you have your surveys and you can
find out about the responses, view statistics so you know what happened. You can do all sorts
of styling. They have some templates, so they'll give you a pre-canned set of questions that
may or may not be useful for what you want to do. Here's a survey we did for the annual
meeting a couple of years ago. We wanted to have volunteers only wanted to know about Tshirts. We wanted to give them T-shirts and so we said okay. What is your name and what is
your T-shirt size, a very simple survey. You get an URL and you mail it out to these people and
they go in and they fill it in and then you can download a spreadsheet with the answers, so it's
very nice to be able to do that. You can do all sorts of things. You can put a section heading in.
You can have a text response. You can have a yes, no response. You have multiple choice. You
can have a grid of multiple choices. You can have a checkbox for a grid of check boxes. There
are all sorts of different flexibility that you can use this for.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Ed Perkins: No. This is FluidSurvey. This is another application. And then you have
advanced questions, so you can do a whole lot of different things with this.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Ed Perkins: This is free. They have a contract with these people so they bought a license.
You can get a summary report so you can get a nice little chart. You get the counts and the
frequencies. You can get it in a PDF form, in a Word form, in a PowerPoint form. You can get
different kinds of output out of these. Unlike these free accounts at some places, you can look
at the web but you can download anything, so this you can download all responses very nice.
You can get a list of all of the people that completed the survey, when they completed and
what they want, so you can look at the details if you want or you can download it as a
spreadsheet. There are different ways you can look at the data. You can do a poll, so you have
a poll name, a question responses and things like that. I'm not sure where the poll option is. It
may be a template. I don't know. I'm not quite sure where the poll is, but you can make a poll.
The other thing is that you can use cookies or IP address is. You can say that only one person
from this IP address can answer the poll, so you can put a cookie on it. If you have answered
the poll it won't let you answer the poll again. You can let people edit their responses or you
can prevent them from doing that. If you are trying to do like voting or something you can
make sure that only one computer, one vote. Blogs, a sections Congress 2008 request people
ask about blogs because they didn't want to have to write things in HTML and upload the
HTML. It was very cumbersome. I don't want to be an IT person. I just want to write a blog.
>>: How do I send the blog out?
>> Ed Perkins: It's provided by the WordPress site, so you have an RSS feed or you can send an
e-mail out with the link to the blog. You could have a little teaser announcing such and such.
Click on the link and do that. Web conferencing, everybody is probably familiar with web
conferencing. If you can't get to the meeting or it's impractical or you don't have a budget to fly
people in from around the country, whatever kind of meeting your trying to do, you can do it
online.
>>: Is that available for the [indiscernible]?
>> Ed Perkins: Yes.
>>: It is?
>> Ed Perkins: We are looking at certain things. You can have for conferencing too, there are
some things, other tools that are available through conferences. You can do several things.
You can broadcast the audio. You can broadcast video. The other option is you can record the
meeting and upload the recording later. The issue we have when broadcasting meetings is you
go to maybe some company and you don't have access to their network, so you really can't be
uploading it, but you may be able to record it and then just upload it later.
>>: If you went to the conference and you wanted to see five of them and they were all on the
same time.
>> Ed Perkins: If you are any conference it would be nice if you could record the sessions and
you can only see one at a time if there are five comparable, so you could view them later. The
other thing is that with IEEE now if you have the e-mail alias, which is on Google, you can use
Google hangouts, so you don't necessarily have to use a WebEx. You can use a more informal
Google hangouts and if you record that it comes up to YouTube.
>>: How does that work?
>> Ed Perkins: I don't know. Google hangouts is not too hard to use. I personally have not
used it, so I'm not sure how you set it up, but I attended a couple of them and you can have the
web cam there and people can be discussing things and not everybody in the audience, but the
panelists and then it's recorded to YouTube and then you can go look at it later on YouTube.
That's really nice because with WebEx you get a WebEx file which is not MP4, which you can get
a tool from WebEx and you can convert it into an MP4 or you have to use a WebEx player to
look at it. So there are a lot of manual steps, whereas, with the hangout there is no after stuff
you have to do. You just record it and you are done and it's on YouTube.
>>: And it's free.
>> Ed Perkins: Right. Hangouts are free because IEEE has an enterprise arrangement with
Google. Videoconference in WebEx, there's a form that you fill in. There is a website about it.
There is a form so you fill in your name, e-mail, your member number and that's it and then you
need other information. When do you want to WebEx? How long is the WebEx? Stuff like
that.
>>: How about screening this stuff? What if it's like bad publicity? If somebody does a hangout
that goes bad?
>> Ed Perkins: If you are you doing it for your OU then somebody should there they should say
this is crap and we don't want it published. ReviewRoom, we talked a little bit about that, if you
have an award competition, scholarships, things like that we want to have people upload things
and have a group of people reviewing them, that's useful for that. The staff can let you get
access to the. Google Drive we talked a little bit about. Every IEEE member has an IEEE Google
Drive account. I guess this probably means even if you don't have an IEEE e-mail alias. I always
thought it was tied to your e-mail alias, but they may have generalized to more. You can sign in
with your web account, username and password and then you can get to it. So if you have an
e-mail alias and you go to e-mail.IEEE.org and you login with your web account and password to
your e-mail alias mailbox and then from there you can get from Gmail, you can get to all of the
Google features that are tied in. If you don't have the e-mail alias mailbox you can just sign in.
Doodle, if you are trying to schedule meetings Doodle is a very useful tool to do that. SAMMIEE
gets to the memory database and you can do queries, different kinds of queries. Depending
upon your officer role you have access to SAMMIEE. If you are a region officer, Doodle is for
scheduling meetings. You list a set of times and you send it out to a bunch of people and then
they come in and say I am available or I am not available and you can get an idea of when most
people are available. SAMMIEE, there is a member database which is refreshed. It's a subset of
the master database, so it's not the master information, but it's an extract of that. That has an
online query tool, so if you are a section officer, then by your role you have access to different
things. Different section officers have access to the section information. SAMMIEE information
officers have access to the chapter information, but not the section information. The
membership development chair has access to the section in the chapters. If you're a region
person you can see all of your region stuff. If you are on the board of directors you can see the
entire IEEE. Depending on your role you can get a different breadth of information. You go in
there and there is an access there. Member information SAMMIEE is for IEEE use only. It's not
to be given to third parties even for mailing lists. If somebody says send us your mailing list
because we want to send a meeting eNotice that we are going to do. No. They send you the
meeting eNotice and you send it to the membership. We don't give the membership
information to anybody else. Here is the SAMMIEE landing page. You go in. It's based on
Oracle and there are some things that you can do. There are reports, so you have your own
little area for queries that you do plus there are predefined queries. There are folders. Your
folder, under shared folders there's the SAMMIEE queries and so there are a whole list of those
in here that are for mostly different things. There are several folders. There are geographic,
membership development, SAMMIEE dashboard, all these different queries that are in there.
In this case we are looking for geographic, so here's a list of some of them. If that active
members gold, which is not just the professionals but basically gold so it could be all of the
active gold members, all the women in engineering.
>>: So those are, you created or is set by who?
>> Ed Perkins: Staff made all these queries, so you can go in and run this and this will give you a
report.
>>: How did you go to run that report?
>> Ed Perkins: These haven't been run. This is just the catalog.
>>: On the catalog I just click it and you can see all the gold members?
>> Ed Perkins: You click it and it runs a query and then you wait and then you get the results
and it will show you the gold members or your young professional members.
>>: The point is I tried to run the report for signal processing. How do I run that using only this
signal processing members?
>> Ed Perkins: You can get counts. I'll get to that in a second.
>>: It runs by e-mail address, not just counts.
>> Ed Perkins: You can get counts by grade, so you can just get counts of things. You can get
active members contact information. For example, here it is active society, this is member by
account, so let's say you wanted active members contact information. What you would do is
you could open this query and you go in and you look at the criteria and you add a filter. You
say I want people whose membership is in a signal processing society, so you filter the query
and then you would run it and you adjust it the signal processing people. They don't have a
query for every chapter. There is not a query for every chapter.
>>: Example, you signal processing society chair. Are they allowed? Are they already done on
the signal processing society membership?
>> Ed Perkins: If the signal processing society chair logged in and asked for active member
contact information, he would only get his signal processing society list.
>>: So they don't even need to do query?
>> Ed Perkins: No. If they logged in and clicked on this, this and their role, they would see their
chapter.
>>: When I logged in can I just choose the signal processing society?
>> Ed Perkins: No. There are like 40 societies. There is not a query for every society in there.
They didn't do that.
>>: So for some simple query like I want to know all the members in Seattle area for single
processing society members.
>> Ed Perkins: You can go in there if you are in the Seattle section, you can go in and you will
access all of the Seattle section people. You put a filter and for signal processing society. You
say I want people whose membership is in the signal processing society. SAMMIEE is down
today. They are doing something to it. It is not available. It's Murphy's Law. We are doing a
presentation and we want you to SAMMIEE we can go to SAMMIEE because it is being updated.
>>: How about if the e-mails bounced back then they never read them is a monitor that they
opened? I guess when they sign up if they cancel and went astray. I mean if you've got 1000 emails how do you know that they got them?
>> Ed Perkins: You don't know. It's whatever is in the database. You find out all the time that
you get them and less than 10 percent of the e-mails are no good. You can go into your
member record, go into my IEEE and look at your account and you can go in there and you can
change your e-mail address, but people don't do that, especially if they drop their membership.
They don't care if we ever see them again, some of them. I have some more slides on
SAMMIEE so let me run through some of these. I might have some more examples in here. I
talked about this, who it's accessible to. If you are looking at queries in SAMMIEE it is a readonly. You're not changing anything. If you make some mistake that doesn't do anything. It just
means your query didn't work right and you've got to try again. I've done that. I'm a query
didn't get any results and I wondered white I didn't get any results. You can either Google
SAMMIEE and find a link or you can go to IEEE.org/SAMMIEE it will take you to the SAMMIEE.
There's a getting started. There is Oracle business intelligence. If you want you get a manual
and let's go to the web and see what I got. SAMMIEE is not up. Let's go back. I'm clicking on
this again just to see if it eNotices anything. Know they still haven't done anything. Let's go
back to the presentation. If you go to the homepage there is a getting started link and then
there is a tutorial so you get information about using it. That can help you understand.
>>: [indiscernible]
>> Ed Perkins: Section access to members of IEEE. It used to you would get a set of 3 1/2 inch
floppies. I can't remember what the size used to be. Every month you would get this mailed to
you and then they had some kind of query system.
>>: How do I get password?
>> Ed Perkins: Use your member account. If you have a role, you are the vice chair?
>>: No he is not the vice chair but he is going to be our signal processing person.
>> Ed Perkins: If he is going to be single processing society, then as soon as he gets reported in
the officer roster as the chair of the signal processing society, then he will be able to log into
SAMMIEE and go in and get a list of current active members and it will give you the signal
processing for the members.
>>: And there will be an e-mail list there?
>> Ed Perkins: What you get is you download a spreadsheet.
>>: If something happens, any society has any event it has to distribute to all members of
Seattle section.
>> Ed Perkins: That means you put them on the Seattle section webpage and then when the
Seattle section newsletter gets sent out a goes out to everybody.
>>: If you want it to officers then you send out to them.
>> Ed Perkins: The queries that time talking about our predefined, prewritten queries. You can
make your own query because you just go in and you can just select from the fields and you can
make your own query. If you are familiar with using Access or one of these other tools where
you make great queries, you can do that. I talked about this. If you are region chair you get the
region things, if you are a section M.D. or a society M.D., so it depends on your role. We say
this 17 times. These are all the different categories of access. You can also add somebody into
SAMMIEE as a recipient for your section, you may have somebody in your section who says I
will handle doing the SAMMIEE stuff, but they are not a chapter chair and not a section officer.
You can put them in as a SAMMIEE recipient or you can contact the staff and say we want Fred
to be our SAMMIEE guy and they will make sure that Fred has access to getting into SAMMIEE.
You go to SAMMIEE, your login, put in your web account, user ID password. There is the
landing page. Up here they have dashboards in very big print. They have a geographic statistics
dashboard as well as a section vitality dashboard, so that's how you get to the dashboard. The
geographic one tells you about new members, how many members moved in this year versus
last year. In other words, you have this year versus last year, this month, year to date, so you
get a lot of nice statistics about your membership. The session vitality has a lot of other
statistics.
>>: What about new members? Where can I see them?
>> Ed Perkins: Let me go in and I think I have these slides here that will cover this. We talked
about the vitality dashboard little bit. These are things where you can get list of your members,
list of your officers. You can find out members who have renewed. You can find out if people
who are in what they call pre-arrears, so after December 31 and before February when they are
deactivated they are in this pre-arrears thing. You can send eNotices and say there is still time
to renew. Obviously, you can find out who has e-mail and who has no e-mail. If you are doing
and election you might want to send these people a letter that says go to this URL and you can
vote. You can find out your young professionals, like members and people like that. I think we
saw this already. These are the graduate students by school so you can find out how many
members you have including graduate members in your school, in your section and you
discover schools that aren't in your section and that is because they have listed their addresses
as they are from your section but you go into the address and it is still in your section. Society
chapter chairs, members in arrears, so you get actual members in arrears. You can get people
who have e-mail, no e-mail and all that. One thing about SAMMIEE is SAMMIEE does not know
about chapters. It does about society memberships. If you have a signal processing society
chapter because it's one society, one chapter. But if you have a chapter of signal processing
and instrumentation and measurement and maybe control systems, so maybe you've got three
chapters, three societies. Having one chapter in your section, you have to get three list out of
SAMMIEE, because SAMMIEE only knows about society memberships. They don't know about
chapters. It doesn't have any construct for chapters. That's a limitation of the information in
SAMMIEE. That's the generic in SAMMIEE. It doesn't know about chapters. It knows about
society members. I am a member of IEEE. I am a member of the bunch of societies and so in
my record it says I am a record of these societies and I'm in this section, but they don't have
that other information. You can add a filter for date ranges. The interesting thing is when you
click on query by default it's going to start running even if you don't want it to run because you
know you have to filter and get it to stop and then go to the criteria. You can cancel it and then
edit it and then go to criteria, so it's like a three-step process. The old version of SAMMIEE you
could go in and say I wanted to edit it and it didn't run. It just went to the editing part. You can
export into a comma separated file. You can get HTML spreadsheet. You get a PDF graph. You
get different kinds of outputs from SAMMIEE for the data. Here's an example of filter. This is
society members for the Oregon section, so this is a query that I made up for the Oregon
section. We have a joint society of circuits and systems components and packaging and so I
have a filter in here. I say membership, I want active members and their membership code is
member of the circuits and systems or the CPMT. I added a filter and it's in the Oregon section
and so now when I run this I'm going to get my joint chapter members. That's how you do it.
You take the query and you add. You click the membership code and you add filters to it. It's
pretty straightforward to do. You got PDF, Excel, PowerPoint you can get some in web archive,
CSVs or XML, so you can get a lot of different kinds of formats of the data out of the report.
You got your CSV file like that so you got e-mails and you go over contact information you've
got. Useful queries, you were asking. There is a senior member upgrade query so it looks for
people who have been a member for more than 10 years. If you graduated, that counts as four,
from college and you've got six more years, so the query looks at 10. You can run through, so
all these people could potentially be candidates for senior members. You get candidates for
senior membership. You get student members by section see get an idea how many student
members there are. You can get contact information. You can get new IEEE members who
have joined in your section in the last 31 days. There's a query for that. Then you get the
members and there are also the members that moved into your section. There are two ways
you can get members. They can join or they move it. There are two queries you go to find out
where they are coming from. Then you can get a higher grade only members, so this has got
everybody students. If you want to just look at that higher grade members there is a query that
just tells you the people are not students. You get the society memberships for the active
members so you can find out what all the society memberships are. The V2s voting has been
obviated because now it automatically will get the thing. It used to be a query you had to do to
get it. You can find out first few members who did not renew. That's an issue because we get
first-year members and I don't renew, a huge percentage like 60 percent don't renew.
>>: They don't like it.
>> Ed Perkins: Some sections have been putting in place programs to reach out to first-year
members and try to mentor them or contact them and look at their IEEE experience as being a
positive experience so when it comes up to renew they go I don't know. And they don't bother.
Some staff contacts. Helen Shiminsky is the primary person who does SAMMIEE. She is very
good. Vera is her manager. If you are in a society, Mary Curtis is the person you talk to or
Roseanne Loyal. That's the staff. Sometimes if you have a problem and you need some special
thing, you can send an e-mail. Helen is very good. Sometimes she is busy or whatever, but she
is very good. You can say hey Helen how do I find out people who did this and this and she can
go off and find the information for you.
>>: Right now it's checking every Monday to see our list is refreshed.
>> Ed Perkins: That's it on SAMMIEE. Here's the active website. Let me clean up the screen a
bit here. That's better for camera purpose is. This is the landing page for vTools. There are
blogs. We didn't go into the blogs, so here's the blog. There's the welcome to vTools. You can
subscribe to an RSS feed for the blog period will say here's an announcement. Sunday is what's
going on. They make an announcement. Or if they are upgrading, they are going to upgrade in
April. Then they have some things about if you are uploading a file into meetings don't put any
of these characters in the name because it will cause problems. Information about WebEx.
There is a lot of information here so this blog is a useful reference if you want to know things
that are going on. They have updated the surveys. They have updated the version of the
survey. This is a useful thing. Things are posted here that will to you what's going on.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Ed Perkins: Okay. You can do WebEx. You can click on the category and then you just see
the things for a particular tools that you want to look at. Bug reports, here is the form. If you
have some kind of feature that you need or you did something because something didn't work
right you can put a report in. There is usually a contact form in WordPress. You can do that.
You can see a list of reports of other things. Let's say officer reporting. There is no ticket.
These are tickets that anybody could look at about problems. If you found some problem you
could go there and look and see if other people reported the problem or not. We want to look
for web conference. There's a web conference. You need to register this training information
so there is a PDF.
>>: When you use it it always jump out and ask you for password. That's why I kind of like to
have password and he say he never give out password, so I couldn't login to WebEx. Because
the form keep on coming into sign in with your password and it comes when you don't have a
password.
>> Ed Perkins: Sometimes there are issues when you go to use it and it once a password or
something.
>>: If I don't use a password I can't login.
>> Ed Perkins: Some of these things I think might be in some of the help files. Here you want to
register for a meeting. It's scheduled by staff and so your name, e-mail, member number, your
office or position, your region. Event type is an event or a meeting. There are vTool meetings
and vTool events and they act slightly differently.
>>: I've been to a meeting, been to event. Okay this is to a event?
>> Ed Perkins: I don't know. If you go back to the help information there was something I was
trying to figure out. I saw something in passing when we were looking here that talked about
what is the difference between a meeting and an event. Let's look up categories under web
conferencing.
>>: I also find when running the web conference in the middle if I have to jump out I couldn't
log back in. It was asking for password.
>> Ed Perkins: I thought I saw something about the differences between meetings and events.
I don't see it in here but I saw something in passing but I don't know where. That would be a
thing to probably understand because there are different characteristics. I have attended some
meetings by staff and those are run as events, not meetings and I don't know exactly what the
differences. Maybe we should put a feature request and it says please explain the difference
between meetings and events. We could fill out the form here and do that. There is a Word
file. Let's see what it says.
>>: You see there is a password, it is asking for password. But I have all those keys but I don't
have a password. I couldn't login.
>> Ed Perkins: This doesn't define the difference between meetings and events. And it doesn't
have the thing about passwords.
>>: The other thing is to have people dial in, you can call out by the computer or dial out by
separate phones.
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah, you can have it call you, you say call using computer. You can use VoIP
with your headset. I prefer to use VoIP with a headset rather than tying up the phone because
sometimes you are on for an hour and stuff like that. Here's the meetings. As you can see
there are almost 15,000 as of today, meetings that have been reported. If I'm a section I can
look at upcoming meetings for my section and so there's, I've got six of them in my section,
Oregon section. I can look at upcoming meetings for the region and so there are 47 meetings in
the region. The nice thing now is that they have enhanced it and it now says the section. You
didn't use to say the section. It would just say executive committee meeting then you would go
where is that? Now they tell you the section where it is. That's good.
>>: How many sections do we have in Washington?
>> Ed Perkins: In the state of Washington you have four sections. You have Seattle, actually
five. You have Seattle, Central Washington, Richland, Spokane and Palouse over in Pullman.
>>: Utah only has one section?
>> Ed Perkins: Yeah, Utah only has one section. Boise is the Idaho. Actually, there are three
sections and I do. There's Boise, Eastern Idaho and I think there is a central Idaho.
>>: Chapter and section relies on the size of the members?
>> Ed Perkins: No. A section is a geographic area of all the members and the chapter is in a
section for certain members of certain societies. It's a geographic organization of people in a
society.
>>: For signal processing is Seattle a section or a chapter?
>> Ed Perkins: It's a chapter. If you have a society that it's a chapter.
>>: In those discussions [indiscernible]
>>: In Seattle section has this much. And on the Seattle section there are members in signal
processing, members of computer [indiscernible] so it's like a segment.
>>: Okay so [indiscernible] is like a segment of this section?
>> Ed Perkins: It's coordinated for web stuff and that's listed here under the web hosting thing.
In region six you could contact Lance McBride. In region one is empty right now. Region 10
there is a person over there. It doesn't say what country he is in. Each region has somebody
who is the information management coordinator and they are a member of an MGA
committee, a corresponding member, so it's a tie-in from what's going on essentially to the
regions. They are responsible to be the top communicating things coming out to the sections,
or if the sections are having some problem to complain to staff. In our region it would be
Lance. Then there is a status and that is like a blog that tells you about the site, web hosting, so
that's a form. There's the form so you can say that I want to whatever. Then there is Web in a
Box, HTML hosting, so these are all the options that you got doing that. There's information
about WordPress. There's documentation on the new theme. They are trying to move us all to
the new theme. Here if you want to get a theme this is how you request to get the code for the
WordPress theme if you are hosting not on the IEEE WordPress but you are hosting it
separately you can get the theme code. Policies for web hosting, it tells you about credit card
information is not permitted. It talks about privacy, SSL, so there are all these user rules. That
stuff is there. That is the web hosting. We have the eNotice. We can go in here. There is a
traditional you eNotice form. In this case it wants me to login to use the system. I am seeing all
of the eNotices for the region. Another person is sending out an eNotice to the section and he
was working on it yesterday. That's the draft ones. I can look at ones that have been sent. I
can look at things that have been submitted.
>>: But that is only for the region. Seattle section does not show up, right?
>> Ed Perkins: Right, because I don't have access to the Seattle section. If I want to create an
eNotice I would go in and there it is. I've got three different things that I can do. I can do
something to the section or the chapter or Nanotechnology and then there is a whole editor in
there where I can put stuff in. I can make things bold. I can pick fonts, so I can make it look
nice. There is supposedly just a plain text message. I can add an attachment and things like
that. That's the eNotice. There is the old eNotice form is still available because they used to be
where you would submit the eNotice text in and it would give submitted to staff. I thought it
was listed here, but maybe not. This one here. If you click on submit an eNotice request here
as opposed to using the new tool, so if you cannot use eNotice please use the old form, so the
old form is still available where basically you put in your name and subject and target type and
so this one is not going to tell you it is within five days of the meeting. You can put in a date,
plain text or HTML, but the thing is if you make an HTML you have to attach the HTML file to
this, but then you send it in. The other issue you get with the online form I discovered is so you
want to put a logo on it or something like that you can't upload the logo because it doesn't
have that concept, so you have to find some place on the web where the logo is and get the
URL to that and then put that as an image in HTML in the message so when you look at it the
logo will show up. But you can't upload the logo into the message.
>>: In this old one you can do it?
>> Ed Perkins: The old one however you can create the HTML, so if you have a way to put the
logo into some kind of message data type thing that is attached to the message you could do
that. I don't have anything that sophisticated that I use because I just use something very
simple, but if you had some kind of tool that would do that whatever that HTML is you could
save that file and attach it and send it in.
>>: The new one cannot do the logo?
>> Ed Perkins: Right. If you had it on your website you could get the URL of the logo on the
website, just point out to the website where the logo was. You could do that, but you can't
upload it into the thing. That's the old eNotice form if the new one doesn't work. I'm not sure
what else we talk about. Vitality dashboard, I don't think is working today because the, so
there's the webpage and it talks about all the stuff. I don't think we are going to be able to look
at anything because I think they said that SAMMIEE was down. Yes, analytics is down. What
else is there that we can look at? Might be the survey.
>>: You want to show scheduling a meeting?
>> Ed Perkins: We could do that. I can do that here. Let's say I want to schedule a meeting. It
wants a title. The title goes in there. We have a category, professional, technical, nontechnical, administrative, so say we are having an Xcom [phonetic] meeting. So it's an Xcom
meeting. Is it Xcom or is it training? You could do training or Xcom, description. I can't type,
but other than that, this isn't tied in with Windows, so it doesn't know enough to have me do
correction. Meeting keywords, put a keyword in, have a start time and an end time. If you click
on this a calendar pops up and you pick and if you want now or you can make it the 31st.
eNotice that they always start sometime in the future so if you want the registration to become
active immediately then you would do now rather than sometime in the future. Time zone, the
building. You have to put the city and the county, country and state. You don't need to put the
building or something like that. You have to say who, so there's all the different organization
units. Young professionals. You have to have a contact information and then you can put any
other stuff like Joe Jones is the contact, in addition to the e-mail. If you are using internal
registration system you can say how many people can sign up. If there is an admission charge,
boom, now all of a sudden you have to have pricing so you have to say the and it's $25 and it
applies to everyone or it applies to non-IEEE members or it applies to members or affiliates or
honorary members for all of the different kind of grades.
>>: The point is this, after you publish you cannot change the fee.
>> Ed Perkins: Right. You pick this and you publish it and you can't. You can require it to be
paid at registration or not. You can pay at the meeting. You can make it optional. You can
allow refunds. You can have a refund request deadline. You can change, so there are all sorts
of things you can do. Remotely accessible, that doesn't do anything else. Somewhere in here is
the speaker information, so here is where you put the speaker information in, what the topic is,
what their abstract is, the speaker bio. If you have any contact information, you can have a
photograph of the speaker here or you can have a photograph about the meeting. It used to be
there was just one photo and all of this was the speaker. The first couple of eNotices that I did
it said meeting picture and I put the speaker's picture in there and then I realized, wait a
minute. There are two, so you can have maybe a picture of the building where the meeting is
going to be or something like that or if it's about raspberry pie, you could put a picture of a
raspberry pie, whatever you want to do. You can have a little bit of flexibility there doing that.
You can say that you are not using, somewhere it says you are not using built-in registration
system. I am not sure where that is. Click here to disable the registration system. So if you are
not using the registration you can click there and none of this stuff about registration matters.
So if there is no admission charge it all goes away. That's the kinds of things that you can do
with the making meeting eNotices. We can cancel that. We don't have to do that. I think that
is about all of the, and then here are surveys. That is something to briefly go through. I am
logged in. It knows I am logged in. There are all sorts of different things that you can access. It
depends on your user account what you can get to. For example, I can look at region six. I'll
find out if I still have access to those. If you want to make a new survey click there, give it a
name, test. There are all sorts of things. You can import an existing survey or import from
another survey if you want. You can create this survey. You can drag your question over. You
can drag questions over. You can change the name of the question, so who are you? You can
change and then you can say instead of variable one you can change that to say first name. You
can make it optional or not. You can make it required, last name. You can make the first name
optional. Where is that? If I click here on first name, so maybe first name is optional but you
have to have the last name, whatever. Now we want to add another question so now we get all
the questions here, so we want a multiple-choice. Now we have a multiple-choice question.
You can do a bulk. You can do three, four, five, so you can save that. Now we have to have a
name. I don't have to have a name. If you click okay you, okay, so now I have added more
choices. You can add a thing that says other, so there's a lot of flexibility you can do. You can
preview it. Okay. That's interesting. What we will do is we will go down here to publish and
we want to look for settings. Sometimes when you go in there and you try to do a preview and
it says it's not available you'll discover that you may need to set a date, something like that, and
then you can preview it. The preview lets you play with the buttons and try things out. Then
when you are done with publishing, you want to publish it, you can go in and you can do the
URL. You can upload e-mails and have it sent e-mails or have a link and send it to the e-mails if
you have the list. There are all sorts of things that you can do to do stuff. I'm not sure how I
cancel this. I'll save my changes. Anyway, there are a lot of things you can do with surveys.
Discard changes. Okay. Okay. So basically there is nothing there. All right. I think that is sort
of a brief run through of vTools and a little bit about SAMMIEE for those of you who want to
know about these things. Now we're done, done.