Hello, At our General Meeting in Toronto I did not give any sort of innagural address. I would like to offer a few thoughts here. I hope you will take some time to think about these issues and engage in their discussion on list or with me. I was struck (again) in Toronto at the extent to which, in a remarkably short time, this association has come to be an institution suspiciously similar to other academic associations. Sitting in panels, it was almost hard to remember how recently the very idea of this conference seemed like an overly-ambitious dream or how, less than four years ago, I was making arrangements for our first meeting in Kansas and wondering if anyone outside the midwestern United States would come. We have now had over 1,000 individuals come to our four meetings, and we have nearly 2,000 subscribers to air-l. Our first Internet Research Annual, bringing together selected papers from the first three conferences, will be released in a few weeks and reviewing for the second annual will begin shortly. In addition, a number of books have already been published or are being planned based on panels and collaborative research projects that grew out of our conferences, and many research papers have been published in journals. Our ethics working group has created a guide that is being used by many scholars and increasing numbers of institutional review boards. Being able to help make all this happen has easily been the most rewarding enterprise of my professional life. I've also been amazed and deeply personally rewarded by the extent to which we have created a community of friends as well as colleagues. I think I speak for many repeat attenders when I say that people who were just names to me before our first meeting are now among my dearest friends and that one regret of our meetings is that I don't have time to get to know all those other interesting looking people walking around. That said, the association's rapid growth and the increased expectations people have of us present a number of challenges and issues, particularly given our status as an all-volunteer association. Like my predecessor in this role, Steve Jones, I believe that my role, and the role of the executive committee in general, is to facilitate the association's organic growth based on the interests, desires, needs, and energies of the members. I do not have a strong agenda I wish to impose on you. I hope all of us will be engaged in making AoIR what we want it to be, recognizing that there are some tensions which may ultimately be unresolvable. In Interpersonal Communication Theory, we talk about "relational dialectics," the idea that all relationships involve continuous efforts to find satisfactory points of balance between competing demands (for instance, the desires that our conferences include scholars from more and more disciplines yet have fewer simultaneous sessions). I hope that AoIR can find balance points that work for most of us, but acknowledge that some will always want more or less of something than others do, and that no approach will ever satisfy everyone. One challenge we face is the expectation that we should always be doing more and exploring areas we haven't. In essense, the challenge here is to take full advantages of the scarce resources we do have and to find new resources in order to create what we want to have. People point out on occassion that as an internet association, we should do more with the internet. Ideas range from overhauling the web site, to creating new online spaces, to creating complex databases of internet research, publications, and so on. There is indeed a tremendous amount of unrealized potential. There are also right now exactly two people who are doing all of our web work, and they are both in the midst of writing Ph.D. dissertations. We have had some successes in this area, most recently the list of AoIR bloggers compiled by Jeremy Hunsinger and Thomas Burg, and the List of Lists compiled by Jeremy, Ulla Bunz, David Silver, and Matt Allen. What we have not had, thus far, are the financial resources to pay people to do these things nor the volunteers it would take to create as many of these resources as we want. One way to reach our online potential is to charge considerably more for membership and conference fees so that we can pay for initiatives like these. Another is for more people who can make these things happen and are willing to see them through to volunteer. Perhaps the most exciting possibility would be if people who have great ideas (and skills) for novel and beneficial ways to use the internet could partner with us in seeking grant funding to make those ideas happen. There are doubtless other possibilities as well, and we will be putting together at least one working group to guide us in thinking through these issues in the coming months. Your thoughts and energies are welcome. If you have the energy to build resources, don't ever be shy about coming to us with your ideas. Another challenge seems to me to be our greatest strength, which is interdisciplinarity. We have a dialectic between wanting to be exposed to and informed by different ways of approaching the topics we care about and at the same time wanting others' work to conform to the standards by which we assess work in our home disciplines. We all need to rise to the challenge of presenting our ideas in ways that will be compelling to those who are not grounded in our traditions while at the same time reaching the standards of our traditions. Part of our challenge as readers and listeners is to find the strengths in work that comes from traditions we don't share. I hear a consistent desire from all ends of the methodological spectrums that, regardless of its tradition, work should offer its audience theoretical significance beyond the case or project presented. One direct way in which you can influence what counts as "quality" at our conferences is to serve as a reviewer next year, and I hope more and more of you will do so. Yet another issue is what we can do to bring more people in from underrepresented parts of the world, particularly those areas where the likelihood of being able to afford our conference is minimal. One of the great promises of the internet is the ability to link people globally in the face of great challenges -- indeed I saw at least one panel talking about the ways in which the internet allows grassroots movements in poor nations to expand their resources through affiliation with one another -- yet making this happen in an association such as ours is far from easy (or cheap). This connects more broadly to the issue of recruitment. My general feeling is that there are so many targets for recruitment (based on methodology, discipline, race/ethnicity, stature, etc) that recruitment is best left to our members to call on those they wish were here to join us. However, I think it is imperative that we do what we can to lessen the financial barriers to participation in AoIR for those who would like to join us but cannot afford to. Any inspirations you have on how we might be able to do this while still breaking even on our conferences (which are expensive to run) would be most appreciated. The last issue I'll raise here is that of what benefits we need to provide in order to make more people and institutions who are interested in AoIR take the leap and become paid members. Dialectic = I want to get more, I don't want to pay for it! As you know, air-l is offered free to everyone. Right now about 1/4 of air-l subscribers are members of the association. Paid members currently get access to the archives of conference papers and discounts on several journals and Routledge's Cyberculture book series. Related to this is whether or not we should have a journal of our own, which would entail higher membership fees and an editorial board (and editor) willing to do editing. Another possibility is to charge somewhat more for membership and include subscriptions to one or several of the existing journals that are relevant to internet research (examples include those to which our members currently receive discounts, such as IcS, NM&S, TIS, Cyberpsychology and Behavior, and so on). A third possiblity is to leave things as they are now and offer our members discounts on a range of journals without building them into the membership fee. We will be putting together another working group to look at these and other possibilities and make recommendations to us. Again, your opinions on journal preferences (or lack thereof) and benefits in general are welcomed. These are by no means the only issues before us, and I am interested to hear your thoughts on what else you would have us consider as well as your thoughts on any of those I have raised. In my time as a steward of this association, I invite all of you to think about what this association does or has the potential to do for you, and what you can do for the association to make it better. Thank you, Nancy -- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org