Fall marks the beginning of the biggest privilege of my professional career, to serve as president of ASCE’s Environmental and Water Resources Institute.
The start of October saw our Governing Board and Council leaders come together at ASCE Headquarters in Reston, Virginia, to plan and prepare for an impactful year of revitalizing our Institute at our annual Leadership Council Weekend. We talked about what we wanted to do in the months ahead, and how we will accomplish our goals and objectives with professionalism and transparency.
Topmost on our minds was implementing our Strategic Plan. The Governing Board kicked off four Task Committees to address themes identified by EWRI leaders at the Listening Sessions we held at our Anchorage Congress back in May. The first Task Committee is charged with rebooting our Communications Strategy to better align with current professional communication content formats, platforms, and delivery methods. The second Task Committee is charged with better understanding the data types and sources our EWRI community needs to effectively accomplish our jobs as civil and environmental engineers.
The third and fourth Task Committees look forward to ASCE2027 and the changes it will bring to EWRI Congress. One of these Task Committees is on Content Delivery, charged with understanding EWRI members’ needs for planning, development, and delivery of technical educational resources. What content is suitable for delivery at the highly multi-disciplinary ASCE 2027 Convention? What specialized content might be better for a more focused specialty conference or workshop? Their task is to explore innovative content delivery methods for all of our members' professional education resource needs. Lastly, the fourth Task Committee is charged with creating and measuring success metrics for ASCE 2027 Convention to assure continuous improvement.
Speaking of ASCE2027, have you noticed that the ASCE2027 website has launched? Submit your abstract to the ASCE2027 call for content. The Planning Committee is looking for your ideas for sessions, panels, workshops, and short courses today! If you’d like to know how the planning is shaping up, you can also sign up for routine updates to ASCE2027 developments.
From topics of strategic importance to operations in alignment with our culture and values, we also finalized our updated EWRI Operations Manual. After a year-long effort by a task committee to better organize and update the content, the manual is more streamlined while enhancing transparency and inclusiveness.
There are big things ahead for our Institute. Stay tuned…