EDITORIAL

Welcome
by
Charles B. Kreitzberg, Editor

This electronic newsletter is frankly an experiment.  Our goal?   To stimulate discussion and innovation among the UPA membership.

UPA is an organization whose time is now.   After years of striving to make usability a priority, usability has become an issue of concern to development organizations worldwide.  As usability professionals, we have a new credibility.  The challenge is to  leverage this interest in usability to support our users, our companies and our own professional growth.

We want to make UPA, our organization, better, richer, and more responsive.  To do this we need to interact with each other and with our elected Board.  We need to create new programs, increase membership, and forge alliances with other associations who share similar interests.  We need to establish SIG's to serve special interests and chapters so we can meet our colleagues face to face.

These are difficult tasks given limited budgets and limited staff.  But the first step is to initiate the discussion.   We will use this newsletter as a vehicle.  I ask you to contribute to it.   Send us your thoughts, your successes, your problems, and share them with the other 874 members so we can learn from and support each other.

Taking seriously Alexander Pope's admonition to "know thyself," we plan to include a member survey in each issue of the newsletter. Answer the questions on-line and we'll summarize the results in the next issue so we can get to know who we are.

And because discussion must be two way, we will shortly set up a list server where members can participate in discussions about UPA and how best to evolve it.

We have a real opportunity to make UPA the organization to support our profession as it becomes critical in the new millennium.   Join with us to make it happen. 

Have a comment? Email us: upavoice@upassoc.org