General Report of the Spring NEISTE Meeting
I thought it would be a good idea to give you all a brief outline of what transpired at this spring’s Neiste meeting held this past weekend in Boston. As you are aware, this organization has been slowly building a strong regional consortium based on individual State’s ISTE affiliate organizations. Vita-Learn is one of the six current participants along with Actem (Me),CECA (CT), REISTE (RI) NHISTE (NH), and MassCue (MA).
The most significant topic this time around was the finalization and board acceptance of the NEISTE By-Laws that have been in the works for over a year. With the voting of the new by-laws, we became a more “official” organization that made way for the elections of new and more clearly defined set of officers along with the groundwork for our next move towards incorporation and establishing a recognized-legal non-profit 501C3 group.
New officers were installed. Vermont is making its contribution by providing the President – Neil Manders. Jeff Kessler from NH is the Vice President. Pat Palmer from RI is the treasurer. Meetings secretaries are provided by the meeting host and is not currently on an ongoing basis.
The treasurer reported that we have received over $14,000 for our partnership with CDI. RI and Mass appear to be the most “in compliance with agreement” states and have generated the greatest revenue share. Other State are also beginning to include items regarding the purchase opportunities with CDI in their communications. Heather Chirtea is collecting state actions in this regard and will be meeting with CDI folk in Toronto to see how we can better leverage this agreement. This discussion enlarged to include talk about a number of vendors who have approached the organization looking for some form of partnership.
Given the current budget balance (due primarily to the CDI deal), the board voted to open discussions with Walter McKenzie (one of the originators of NEISTE and consultant) to help us develop a plan to engage a full or part time self-sustaining Director to begin a more concentrated push to move the organization forward. This plan is to be presented to the board so that an announcement can be made at the NEISTE reception during the 2010ISTE conference.
We reviewed the First NEISTE Newsletter with contributions from each of the various states. (NOTE that I uploaded that to our website but feel free to include it in any correspondence to your individuals lists). We are looking at producing a second newsletter in September that will showcase all the conferences and include a CDI press release
We reviewed the new Listserv and tweeked any accounts. The board has decided to migrate our existing Web Site over to the new server and make significant modifications so that it can become more of a resource area than simply a poster board
Heather and I made the announcement that since it is Vermont’s turn in the rotation of meetings, we would be holding the November meeting in conjunction with our VermontFest Conference at Killington. This will give our board a chance to participate as well as NEISTE board members an opportunity to attend some or all of our conference.
ACTION Points:
1. The NEISTE reception is planned for Tuesday, June 29th at the Convention. If you are going to the 2010 ISTE conference, please consider attending
2. On Saturday, June 26th ISTE is having it’s full annual day long meeting followed that evening with their reception. If anyone would like to attend, NEISTE has a couple of free seats. Last year we “shared” those by having interested attendees kick into a pool, purchase what ever extra number of tickets were needed, and split the cost. If you would like to go, just drop me an email and I will forward it along. (Needs to happen very soon)
Neil Manders, Vita-Learn Rep to NEISTE
