AMS Minutes January Monday January 16, 2023
We started the meeting introducing ourselves.
Mike Augustyniak talked about a new board under the Commission on Professional Affairs. It's called the Student Affairs board. Technically it’s the AMS board on Student Affairs, but it’s abbreviated SAP, Student Affairs. This comes out of AMS’ goal to make sure that we are paying as much attention to the early career folks and even students as we are the senior career folks.
We discussed how we need to evaluate our awards differently. The AMS Council wants to see rubrics for evaluating Award nominees. For two reasons. The first is to make it fair from year to year as people roll on and roll off the board. And to have some basic set of criteria on which people are being judged, but also to increase transparency.
There are fewer Award nominees than anybody realizes. There are some years where we get zero nominees for some awards across the society. To become more transparent the process and get more nominations, we are putting in this rubric so that we can put these bullet points on the website.
Lastly, we are getting a strong push from counsel to use the AMS community page and system more for board communications. The reason is we're seeing that a lot of information across the society getting lost in the shuffle. And that's everything from council meeting minutes to board information being harder to find from year to year. Our new Executive Director wants to be protective of our volunteer’s time.
We discussed our award nominations for broadcast science reporter of the year:
Nominations open February 1, and they'll stay open through May 1.
Broadcast Conference:
This is the 50th broadcast conference. It's going to be held June 21 to the 23rd in Phoenix at the Arizona Grand Resort and Spa.
We discussed what we want to do for the outing. And we started talking about session topic proposals.
We discussed the main speaker we wanted to get for the conference is Ginger Zee. We also discussed other speakers we could get for the conference.