ATHEN Annual Business Meeting 2007 @ Accessing Higher Ground

Here are highlight notes from the ATHEN business meeting at the 2007 Accessing Higher Ground conference in Boulder, Colorado last week. The full minutes will be posted on the ATHEN website soon enough.

The election results give us some new officers on the Executive Board:

• President = Ron Stewart
• Vice-President = Terry Thompson
• Secretary = Dann Berkowitz
• Treasurer = Heidi Scher

In addition - Joe Humbert is taking over as Membership Coordinator.

As for news and business:

• E.A. Draffan provided an update on the October TechShare conference in the UK. There is a desire to open this conference up to entities outside of the UK.
• Terry Thompson gave a report on the EduCause IT Accessibility Constituent Group. There is a need for more accessibility professionals to be involved in Educause.
• Dan Comden gave an update on the postsecondary strand for ATIA Conference. Though very K-12 in nature, ATIA is making efforts to reach out to the higher education community and ATHEN seems to be the conduit for this interaction. BTW - Ron Stewart is a founding member of ATIA.
• The 3rd edition of the ATHEN Journal will be up on the website soon and the 4th edition is looking for submissions. The theme for #4 is "Who We Are as a Profession"
• Sean Keegan looking for website content - however, members can add their own information and content to the ATHEN Wiki.
• Speaking of the Wiki - the survey team has a final draft up on the wiki for inspection and comment.
• Pratik Patel provided an update on the iTunes U. accessibility project on behalf of Joe Humbert who was off at another conference.

Of course we cannot forget that E.A. Draffan was honored with the first ever Life-Time Honorary Membership to the organization.