Roger Buxton
November 6, 2007
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-fifth, and dinner. I would like to extend a special warm welcome to this evening's guest speaker, Alex Giannelia, who will continue our tradition of addressing broad, current issues in remote sensing, and we look forward to hearing his opinions on the history, future, and the potential of airborne imagery in a little while.
Your executive committee has been busy this past year, as always, but, in spite of several accomplishments, we did not make as much progress as we had expected.
On the positive side, as a result of Jim Freemantle's, our new Program Coordinator, efforts, we have had several interesting and diverse technical seminars. And, as a result of Ron Johnson's initiative and effort, we had a joint display and film program with the Ninety-nines, the women's pilot organization, at the Ontario Science Centre during Environment month last April. I would like to thank both of them, and all the others who participated in those activities, for their efforts. Our technical program remains the core of our activities and appeal to our members, and I am glad to say that Jim will continue his good work and has lined up a full program for the coming several months.
I would also like to thank Ian Hale, our previous Program Coordinator, and the person who has organized these AGMs here at Ryerson, for the past several years.
Thanks to Andrew Graham, our website has been running smoothly, and it obviously continues to be an important portal for our presence in the world, and we are pleased that he has agreed to continue being our webmaster.
Also, thanks to Jonathan Li, our awards program has continued, and we are obviously indebted to PCI Geomatics and to Spatial Geo-Link Limited for sponsoring the awards which we will get to in a little while.
Our finances remain in good shape, thanks to our Secretary-Treasurer Doug Parent, though he has moved onto a new career as a MBA student and as such has relinquished his position in OARS.
We are as always grateful to our sustaining members and organizations who ensure that we can say that. They are (in alphabetical order):
And, as always, we are all indebted to Lawton Tam for being the go-between for so many activities on so many occasions and so keeps us all on our toes. As a physicist, I liken him to the four forces in nature which keep masses together, and without which the whole world would fly apart. Thank you, Lawton, again.
I would also like to acknowledge our Vice President, Irene Rubinstein. Her efforts and contributions have always been valuable. In particular, we have used her classroom at Seneca College as the venue for most of our committee meetings - for free, I might add.
So those, in a nutshell, have been our accomplishments.
Where we have fallen short is in attracting new members. Last year at this time, I identified recruitment and links with other like-minded organizations as step number three in our plan to ensure that OARS remains an active and relevant organization. Well, it still remains to be done, and it is particularly urgent as our membership numbers are uncomfortably low, and the pool of people who have been willing to fulfill the tasks of the Executive Committee are even lower. Last year, I made an appeal to all of you to recruit one new member each. I don.t think many did, so I reiterate the appeal: please recruit one new member from the traditional establishments of universities, governments, and industries,
Furthermore, please let us know if you can help us link with other professional and interest groups, such as ours, 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!
Until we accomplish that goal, our other aspirations have to remain on hold. Aside from a strong technical program, membership recruitment has to be our main focus.
So, that's where we see our need, direction, and work in the coming year, and we need and welcome your participation to carry it out.
Thank you all very much.