President's Report for the 34th Annual General Meeting
Roger Buxton
November 2, 2006
On behalf of all the members of the Ontario Association of Remote Sensing, I would like to welcome you to this year's Annual General Meeting, our thirty-fourth, and dinner. I would like to extend a special warm welcome to this evening's guest speaker, Dr. Robert Moses, who will continue our tradition of addressing broad, current issues in remote sensing, and we look forward to hearing his opinions on the power and the potential of imagery in a little while.
As in any good organization, we began this past year with lofty goals and an ambitious list of tasks based on the plan I enunciated this time a year ago. We want to ensure that OARS is a thriving, relevant organization which provides its members with value, and is attractive to potential new members. We are not sleepers! Nor are our numerous executive committee meetings an excuse to indulge in beer and pizza! So, I would like to provide you with a brief report of how far we have come in the past twelve months.
Step one was to revamp our Association's image to the world via our website. The revised version is now up and running thanks to the generous donation of design services of Systemthink Analytics Inc. We now have our own domain; www.oars.on.ca, and a commercial ISP. In addition, we have a webmaster, Andrew Graham, who has been able to input the material at our request. So, we now have full control over our site, and therefore invite our members to provide us with suitable content for the benefit of our members and other interested readers. We also provide links to sponsors' and benefactors' sites to recognize their contributions to our organization.
Step two was to plan our technical program calendar for the year. The technical program of evening meetings with guest speakers has always been the mainstay of our organization, but it is hard to show prospective members and sponsors the merits of joining and supporting OARS without a concrete plan of future technical meetings. We were pretty successful in accomplishing that goal in the past year. Furthermore, we were able to have a variety of meeting venues as a result of our members' contacts at Seneca College and York University, which reduced our reliance on Ryerson University. We thank all those institutions for the use of their facilities, and we would welcome your suggestions of other TTC-friendly and parking-friendly options as well.
Looking ahead, we are close to our goal of having arranged speakers for all of the planned sessions for the coming year. Once we post that information on our website, each one of you will be able to know when and what each meeting will cover and, more importantly, will enable you to communicate this information to your colleagues to invite them to attend and become members of OARS.
With steps one and two in place (and being revised continuously), step three will be to approach individuals, institutions, and organizations to invite them to participate in OARS and bolster the membership with both new vitality and experience. We expect to approach not only the traditional establishments of universities, governments, and industries, but also other interest groups such as ours, but those involved in application areas such as the environment, mineral exploration, and the like. So, I again send out a call to action to all of you to identify people and organizations you think should be contacted to strengthen OARS's membership, and let us know!
I still dream about providing web broadcasts of our technical sessions so that we can truly become the Ontario Association of Remote Sensing rather than the de-facto Toronto Association of Remote Sensing that transportation realities make us. In the past, I have been advised that web broadcasting was not practicable, but I ask all you computer and web-savvy people to keep looking at the technology and cost and to let us know when that situation has changed to the point of making it feasible for us. We welcome your advice and help in accomplishing this goal.
Rather than requiring that people come to southern Ontario (read Toronto) to hear our speakers, Jim Freemantle has suggested that we arrange for a person to tour selected locations to speak to interested groups, and we hope to pursue that idea. Likewise, we hope to pursue the idea of speaking to high schools to educate and attract students into our areas of interest. Both of these ideas are in the early stages, but I think they deserve following up.
So, that's where we see our need, direction, and work in the coming year, and we welcome your participation to carry it out.
It's important to recognize that most of the credit for all the accomplishments and ideas I have mentioned belongs to the hard work of the members of the Executive Council. For those who may not be familiar with the mechanics of OARS, we have five officers and typically twelve councillors, each of whom serve for a staggered two-year term. The other officers will provide their reports in a moment.
Our Vice President, Irene Rubinstein, doesn't get to present a report, but I would like to acknowledge her efforts and contributions which have always been valuable.
Our Secretary-Treasurer, Doug Parent, will report on our finances, which, I am glad to say, are still healthy. We are as always grateful to our sustaining members and organizations who ensure that we can say that. They are (in alphabetical order):
- The Airborne Sensing Corporation
- Bird and Hale Limited
- Dendron Resource Surveys Incorporated
- Etech
- GeoICT Laboratory at York University
- ImageSense Land Information Associates
- LARSEES at Queen's University
- PCI Geomatics Inc.
- Ryerson University Department of Civil Engineering
- Spatial Geo Link Limited and Sani International Technology Advisors Inc.
- Spectranalysis Incorporated
- Wedler Enterprises Limited.
Thank you all very much.
Our Technical Program Coordinator, Ian Hale, will report on the year's activities. He has fulfilled this role eminently well for some time but will step down at this time so let me thank him for all the hard, timely, and effective work he has done for OARS.
Our Communication Coordinator, Lawton Tam, will report on our website and other outreach activities. I, like many others, am always grateful for the diligence that Lawton brings to his role, especially his unfazed determination to make phone calls to ensure that members of the Executive Council do what they are supposed to do and go where they are supposed to go when they are supposed to be there. He has performed this essential but usually unrecognized task for a long, long time and without his efforts I am sure that we would be lucky to accomplish anything at all, so, thank you Lawton.
Our Awards Committee under the able and conscientious direction of Jonathon Li has succeeded for the third year in attracting applications for our student awards, and we are grateful to PCI Geomatics and Spatial Geo-Link for their sponsorship which makes the awards so meaningful to the winners. Jonathan will move from Ryerson University to the University of Waterloo in a couple of months, so we wish him well in his new position.
Our Academic Committee is currently in hibernation and will have to await the warm spring of somebody's renewed enthusiasm to advance its goals.
Overall, then, I feel that we have made progress in this past year, and I thank you all for your help and contributions. We look forward to another interesting year ahead.