Looking back - past six months in the BoD

Yes, six months have passed already!

Before I start, let me say how proud I am to be part of this community, thank you!
The VR world in general is a vibrant and creative environment, it's a challenge to keep working ahead of the curve, hence, having a community such as this is fundamental to exchange information and learn with each other.

When I decided to candidate myself to the BoD my main goals where:

1) Help defining a strategy for the IVRPA.
2) See what more can we do to showcase the work of our members.
3) Find what can be done by the IVRPA to help members dealing with the copyright infringing issues.
4) Help establish the IVRPA has source of knowledge that manufacturers could turn to fine tune their soft and hard wares to the needs of our community.

The first goal is a work in progress, we have setup a committee for defining the IVRPA identity and from that will result a new strategy for the association. All members where invited to contribute to this discussion, many valuable points where made and are being taken into consideration. The general idea is to make the IVRPA more professional oriented but still welcoming anyone that wants to be a part of this community.
The Board is also working to make the association more professionally organized. This will still be a place made voluntarily by the members and for the members, but we are making an effort to have procedures in place to speed up what needs to be done and make sure that it gets done. One of the problems inherent of volunteer work, is that it's difficult to ask volunteers to meet deadlines because usually they volunteer their free time, and sometimes free time is scarce, so basically, the idea behind the creation of committees is that more volunteers are involved ans when one doesn't have time, the other comes in and help in a certain task, when a set of tasks rests on the shoulder of only one volunteer it tends to get stuck whenever the volunteers lacks the time for it. This is not an easy milestone to achieve, it involves the creation of groups and the learning process of working together, but slowly we are heading in this direction.

The second goal has been in my head since day one but is yet to materialize because we are upgrading the Drupal framework that sustains our website to a more recent version before making substantial changes to the website contents. It should be said that Aldo Hoeben did a great job automating the PayPal automated subscription process, and also in the quest to find a new host for the website. We are now running on Dreamhost and we are happy with it, thanks to our friends from the WWP Foundation for suggesting this to us. What I can say is that as soon as possible, we will consider new ways to showcase the work of our members, either up-lifting the cap in the contributions number or creating new areas such as portfolios, etc. I hope to discuss this in more detail in the near future.

Regarding the copyright issues, we haven't made any progress, it's more complicated than I thought at first because of the legislation differs from country to country, but I plan on start a discussion about this in a couple of months and at least we should be able to achieve some broad recommendations that might help our members stay protected from copyright infringement as much as possible.

The last goal is in the making, during the last member chat it was mentioned that we wanted to have a kind of featured articles magazine in our website. The main source of news will be the IVRPA member Blogs, but featured content will be promoted too along side tutorials hardware tests, etc.
Why not start now? It's easy, just login to your IVRPA account and select My Blog/Post new Blog entry and contribute content to the IVRPA website!