Society of Ethnobiology Board Meeting Minutes

Society of Ethnobiology Board Meeting Minutes

Date: May 6, 2015 9:00 AM – 2:00 PMLocation: Goodland Hotel Gaviota Room

Attending: William Balée, Scott Herron, Cissy Fowler, Denise Glover, James Welch, Chelsey Armstrong,Janelle Baker, Dana Lepofsky, Liz Olson,Aidee Guzman, Cecil Brown, Karen Park, Daniella Shebitz, Paul Minnis, Gene Anderson

Reports

President’s Report & Remarks (BillBalée)

3 major accomplishments of the previous year: 1) fellowship program, 2) 10 digital memberships, 3) Ethnobiology Letters

Election Results, Introduction of New Board members, & Announce 2016OpenBoard Seats (Scott Herron)

Scott reviews 2014 ballot and voter turnout. For turnout, we had decent but not great voter turnout. Announcements pulled in more voters. We need to engage more members to participate in the elections. Total turnout for 2014 was 66 voters. We may move elections to January. We will be electing 2 new board members in 2015 since James Welch’s and Janelle Baker’s whose terms end in May 16.

Discussion about the board structure and definitions of board members. Discussion about Journal Liaison position – we need this person to wake up thinking about the journal. Society of American Archaeology has someone who oversees publications

Conference Report (Liz Olson)

For this year’s conference 171people are registered, 144 abstracts, 142 presentations, 122 papers, and 20 posters are scheduled. Dana made a big deal about the poster session with a reception, etc. so we need to promote posters to make people want to do it. Chumash session tomorrow.Film festival that Janeille Pfeiffer organized.Two fieldtrips. Banquet with a Chumash elder. Santa Cruz island tour had more seats open. Jan and Amber are taking people to the S.B. Botanical Garden. Special designations on the nametags of students. Dana asks about analysis of conference participation.

2016 Conference plans (Paul Minnis at 10:00 AM)

The 39th conference will be in Tucson, Arizona 16-19 March 2016. Paul Minnis is the local host and has recruited numerous partners (Arizona State Museum, Desert Museum, Native Seed Search, etc. U. of Arizona Press will be there with books and other presses will be there too. Every sponsor is putting up $500, but the State of Arizona has just cut the higher education budget. O’odham Food Cooperative. We need to reach out more at the conference: we could have docent membership programs, a small panel about people and nature today for docents etc. Paul says outreach is really important. They’re next organizing committee is in July. Suzy Fisher and Gary Nabhan are on the organizing committee. James mentions the membership committee: the committee needs to develop advertising venues, email lists, marketing outlets. Market to local people (grey hairs, no hairs). Liz asks about workshops and Paul says they don’t always work well, but he’s open to it by e.g., Native Seed Search. James suggests that mini-courses works well in Brazil: a 1-day pre-conference workshop. Karen mentions a “Plants, Animals, and Words” to train ethnobiologists how to do phonetic transcriptions. The Bureau of Anthropological Research runs workshops. Karen mentions Linguistic Society of American mentions 1-year free membership for new graduating PhD students. Scott suggests sponsoring an art contest among local artists for conference logo. Paul Merocha will do the logo, but Paul suggests have a “Nature and Humans” art exhibit. Collective conference posters. Ask Paul to do a logo that could make a collectible poster. Cecil suggests tshirts. Paul is suggesting giving suaros. Cissy suggests giving seed packs from Native Seeds Search. Paul doesn’t like themes, so he suggests calling it the 39th annual. Tucson Festival of Books is the week before and the Indian Art Show is the Saturday after. Dana suggests making connections with the Press. Scott suggests connecting with the local NPR station. Paul suggests a new member or first time conference-goers reception with a free drink and a raffle or a year’s membership. We will have a student mentor lunch too.

Action Item: Paul asks for ideas for ways to make money for the Society and for doing outreach to local Tucson community and for workshops/classes/events in addition to the fieldtrips he is planning.

Action Item: Paul suggests the Society has a press liaison and we find that person within our membership who has a background in journalism.

Action Item: Bill suggests giving out 10-20 free memberships to local people (students, etc.). Denise will help Paul with the free memberships.

Action Item: Scott suggests sending a letter to the membership about conference schedule, elections, etc. Dana suggests sending a separate notice about change of date for the conference.

Call for Proposals for Conference 2017!

We need to start asking for proposals: Jalisco Guadalajara, Mexico (Liz Olson, joint meeting with SEB via Bob Bye), St. Louis MO, Portalnd, OR, Fort Worth, TX, Albuquerque, NM, Sitting Bull Tribal College (Linda Different Cloud), University of Boston (Mac Marston), BANFF (Janelle), College of Menominee Nation (Alex McAlvay and John Overstreet), Rio de Janeiro (James Welch). Dana suggests developing a matrix of the factors that go into choosing a conference location. James suggests moving the board meeting with a 1-day or ½ day pre-conference.

Treasurer’s Report (Denise Glover)

Denise reviews the handout “Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2014.” Today we have 468 members. Membership is down for now, but it’s just that time of year. “Membership” includes the approximately 100 institutional members (but does not include BioOne members). This data is good to use in considering how to increase membership. For now, our income exceeds our costs by about $10,000. The conference costs haven’t been settled, so that amount will change. BioOne income has increased and we’re up to $18,000 which are “dissemination revenues,” not “royalites” because of tax reporting as a non profit. Steve consulted a tax lawyer and determined that we can ethnically call it “dissemintation revenues.” The revenues still do not cover the costs of the journal, so we still rely on our membership dues to cover the gap. Denise recommends a 10% increase in membership fees. The board experimented with a sale on memberships in hopes it would increase our membership numbers, but it did not. Cecil says his idea behind the fire sale was to make access to the Journal of Ethnobiology online for free to everyone. We discuss other potential revenue streams. Karen suggests recruiting patrons from outside of the core community of researchers.

Chelsey points out the web expense is $8548.11. This cost won’t be as high in future years.

Denise says printing the journal is actually what causes us the most. This is the first year that we have more online members than print members. So we might think about how to reduce the number of journals we have to print. Denise and Bill suggest increase institutional membership fees.

Action Item: Paul recommends getting a financial advisor

James suggests having a minimum online membership for everyone (students, professionals) and a category for professionals. Then we wouldn’t be subsidizing the print memberships.

Action Item: Scott recommends gathering opinions and brainstorming between now and the fall. During the fall conference call we can make a plan and voting on solutions.

Action Item: Find out how many members don’t have access to the journal through a university of college. Dana hypothesizes this is a small number, but our membership doesn’t join for access to the journal because they already have access.

Action Item: Increase by 10% in membership fees all types of memberships.

Fellowships (Steve Wolverton via Skype between 11:15 and 11:45 PM)

We had 8 applicants for ethnobiological, 5 for urban, and 2 for the indigenous fellowships. The Fellowships Committee is Steve Wolverton, James Welch, and Scott Herron. We reviewed the applications on the criteria of conceptual theoretical framing, expectations, and practicality. Steve will chair the committee again next year and wants to use these criteria again. October 15 will be the deadline again for 2015. The timeline for funding will be the same: said they’ll be done by February, but actually done by December. The requirement of getting transcripts was difficult for the students, so Steve recommends dropping the requirement of getting a transcript. James proposes specifying language requirements – whether it’s defined as English or whether there are more languages. Scott suggests – we could stick with 3 committee members – asking consultants to review fellowship applications – people who can speak other languages. Current financial structure is that an anonymous donor give $750 for each of the 3 fellowships and the Society matches each $750 allocation (out of our annual budget) to be put in a fund for the future so that the program is sustainable for 5 years. The donor might be willing to extend the program. Our 3 2015 winners are diverse: 3 women, 3 ethnic groups, 3 locations. Scott asks Steve to stay on as Chair. Paul recommends going for an endowment.

Journal of EthnobiologyEditors’ Report (Dana Lepofsky)

The editorial team (Dana, Kris, and Lee) was appointed by Bill 2 years ago for a 3-year term and they have had a rocky road. The Journal and EBL together moved to using OJS as our online submission platform. James says that OJS is rolling out the next version this year so it is going to be much improved over the clunky current version. Cecil has used several online submission systems and they are all difficult. All 3 editors are burned out. Lee and Kris are stepping down at the end of summer 2015. Steve will move into the editorship with Dana. Dana will stay here for another year at least and longer if the board wishes. Some of the problems they’ve had: not enough submissions initially, they made lots of changes, etc., and they’ve spent a lot of time working on the journal. We need to talk about what kind of work load is sustainable. Bill Balee says that he takes to hear advice from Dick Ford from years ago that a successful society has a journal and a conference. The journal could work better if we could grow the journal: what should an editor be doing? Our journal is going to help the society grow by keeping us in the digital universe.JoE needs a policy on how to deal with publications now that NSF and other funders require authors to have publications publicly available in a public institution within 12 months. Denise suggests that JoE needs to hire a copyeditor. It takes money to grown money in the case of the journal. Dana shares a yearly article tally on the overhead. The Impact Factor is driven by how much we publish. The more we publish, the more citations we have, the more money we make, the higher the Impact factor. Dana says we should publish 4 articles per year – we have to do this to be financially sustainable. With so few articles published, we can’t have a big Impact Factor. The Journal has set the term for editorial board members at 10 years. JoE needs a publications activist on the board. We need an activist. Bill proposes an appointed position. If we have a liaison, we have to be specific about their duties.

Action Item: Add Editorial Board to BioOne and SoE websites.

Action Item: The Journal needs help from the Board.

Contributions Report (Marsha and/or Justin)

Nancy Turner’s monograph is still in the works.

James brought extra copies of his and Amadeo’s books to put on the book table and we can sell them.

Royalties for the whole year was $370.00 from

Action Item: James would like to see the stats on PDF downloads from the SoE site.

Action Item: At Business Meeting tell people to submit their books once their done with their

dissertations or send a mailout.

Ethnobiology LettersEditors’ Report (JamesWelch and Cissy Fowler)

Change in Editors and Addition of Book Review Editor: Cissy is resigned at co-editor. Mac Marston will replace Cissy now. Steve Wolverton will rotate off the board by the end of the year. James and Mac will decide if they want to bring on a 3rd editor. The mini-review has had more downloads than any other article in EBL. EBL is publishing a special issue.

Indexing: EBSCO and Scopus We have just been accepted by EBSCO. We are still under consideration by WebScience.

LOCKSS is to transform digital journals into permanent library holdings. EBL applied to be included and LOCKSS accepted our application.

EBL costs $1500/year for the Society.

Action Item: The board will review the work of editors of JoE, Contributions, and EBL every 2 years.

Secretary’s Report (Cissy Fowler)

Social Networking & Website (Chelsey Armstrong)

New Website

Chelsey does a brief tour of the new website. She points to the new Creative Corner where Denise’s ethnobiology song is posted and where Gary Nabhan’s poems will be posted. Janelle suggests a photo gallery of ethnobiology tattoos.

Chelsey suggests we add a blog to the website. The board discusses this idea in relation to local chapters. Janelle suggests have a blog with a guest blogger. James suggests a profile page with a place to post news and notices that could be posted by a SOE member who created a local profile. We have to have a sustainable tool that is sustainable, that it has a moderator but that moderator doesn’t have to monitor it everyday.

We’re doing well on Twitter.

Dana suggests that Social Media becomes part of the Outreach/Inreach position. Social Media becomes separate from Website Liaison board position.

Membership (JamesWelch)

The Membership Committee has developed a series of recommendations. We need to reconvene the membership committee, decide who is on it, and revisit the projects. Dana suggests articulating the goals. James answers to increase membership, increase visibility, increase diversity of membership, increase communication with other organizations out there that are related to SoE. The Committee was Scott, Janelle, Daniela, Denise, and James.

Local Chapters (James Welch)

The Local Chapters program has been discontinued. Most local chapters did not respond and were not reachable. U.of Hawaii was upset that we eliminated the local chapters. U. of Washington, who had applied to be a local chapter was not happy either. James suggests a local chapter/pod/rhizome where the chapter could post a profile. This opportunity for local chapters to have some online presence would be a blog. If the local chapter weren’t regularly kept up, the local node/pod would disappear.

Action Item: Chelsey will find a few templates for the local chapter online presence.

Action Item: James Welch will contact the U. of Washington applicants and the U. of Hawaii chapter to tell them what we’ve decided to do with the local chapters.

Student Activities Report (Janelle Baker)

The student listserv has 36 members. The website has a link to the listserv. This year we have a student social at the Nuggett Restaurant near the hotel. Students have the option to have their nametags marked as being students.

The Mentor Award: Janelle set up a system for nominations. They have 4 nominations and voting is still open. The prize is a gift Chelsey got for $15.00. The winner of the Mentor Award will be announced at the Business Meeting.

The Mentor Lunch: This year we charged the students $15.00 each, but next year we will not charge the students – either the Society will pay for it or the Mentors will pay for it.

OSN (Janelle Baker)

Janelle is the liaison. She’s been attending monthly Skype meetings and they have OSN meetings. Janelle may need someone to stand in for her on their summer meeting. OSN wants more anthropologists and more SOE members. Janelle is on the board of OSN. OSN has been talking about establishing a professional ethnobiologist certification. OSN likes to do a teaching Tuesday at conferences, but they aren’t doing it here this year. Instead OSN is doing a teaching session with Valentino Salvo and Janelle Baker and Karen Hall. Janelle wrote a piece about the SoE conference for the OSN Newsletter. She is scheduled to help in the teaching workshop at the SEB meeting, but she wants to get out of it.

Old Business

None

New Business

Awards (Liz Olson)

Awards will be presented at the General Business Meeting. Scott will present the Undergraduate Ethnobiologist Award to Aidee Guzman. The Best Poster Award and the Barbara Lawrence Award will be presented at the Business Meeting. The Barbara Lawrence judges are Karen Park, Carla Burton, and Andrew Gosler. The Best Poster Award judges will be Cissy and Daniella. Bill will present the Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award to Bill Balee.

Scott reports that our UG winner is a Chicana. Scott received 8 applications.

The Future of the Society (Bill)

Adjourn

The meeting was adjourned at 3:33 PM

Appendix 1

Board Members brainstormed our goals for membership and the Journal.

Professional Development & Growing Membership Discussion