Executive Committee Changes
Draft-Distribution System for
2009 Annual Meeting
In keeping with longstanding practice, the ALI Council met in May just before the start of the Annual Meeting, while the Executive Committee met immediately after the Annual Meeting. At its meeting, the Council received Committee and other reports, elected officers (as reported in The ALI e-Reporter in June), and nominated seven current Council members for new five-year terms. Agenda items for the Executive Committee included review of the current fiscal year’s revenues and expenses and consideration and approval of budgets for the new fiscal year (which starts on July 1), and evaluation of the Annual Meeting just ended.
As a result of the Committee’s evaluation of the 2008 Annual Meeting, which was very favorable overall, Institute members will see a few changes next year. Most significantly, print drafts for the 2009 Annual Meeting will be distributed by mail in advance of the Meeting only upon a member’s request; the Institute’s practice of the last two years, in which members were invited to “opt out” of receiving print drafts, will become an opt-in system next year. After reviewing the disappointing response rate to the draft-distribution surveys conducted in 2007 and 2008—which under the opt-out policy meant that all Institute members who did not respond to the survey received all of the Annual Meeting drafts in the mail—the Executive Committee agreed that the default should be reversed in order to save some of the earth’s and the Institute’s resources. All members will continue to have free online access to the drafts, whether or not they request the 2009 print drafts. And, as usual, print drafts will be available at the Meeting itself. Members will be reminded of this change in upcoming Institute communications, and next year’s draft-distribution survey will make very clear what members must do in order to find one or more of the familiar white books in their mailbox next spring.