New Year Challenges relies on Last Year's Success
Dr. David Flanigan, CSEP - Chapter President--2022
Happy New Year and welcome to 2022! The chapter has been hard at work compiling last year’s awards documentation based on all of our members’ participation over the year. I’d like to share the summary of our year in review from 2021:
The INCOSE Chesapeake Chapter started out 2021 continuing the pandemic operations from 2020 and continuing to serve the professional community to encourage, promote, and advance the systems engineering discipline. Since 2020, the Chapter adjusted to the new way of engaging with individuals and addressing the limitations in in-person meetings, monthly dinners and presentations, direct support at science fairs, and involvement in the SE and STEM communities. This provided a good foundation to continue these operations in 2021 and support the membership in a more virtual fashion, while continuing to leverage Zoom, YouTube, and streaming technology to connect the members with the community and INCOSE.
The Chapter continued to support the monthly meetings, newsletters, and STEM involvement for the local science fairs, all virtually. Support to the INCOSE international events (IS and IW) were still strongly supported in 2021, although we missed seeing our friends and colleagues in person for these events. We did note that the Chapter gained regular followers outside of the chapter at the monthly presentations, to include countries as the UK and Australia, and many of us were able to follow other chapter meetings as they were streamed online. The Chapter ended the year with a couple of live events – a social gathering and guided tour at the Guinness brewery in October, and the annual winter gala at the Engineers Club in Baltimore in December.
We relied heavily upon the technology both to connect our chapter members with our events as well as to archive them for future use. We promptly loaded the presentation materials and after action reports to our website to capture a rich amount of detail for viewers. We note that the number of YouTube hits far exceeded the live attendance of the monthly presentations; perhaps this is a new trend to leverage connecting with the systems engineering community, through a series of interactive, on-demand content vs. the legacy synchronous connectivity. As 2022 looks to be similar to 2021 in terms of virtual connections to our membership, we look to take advantage of what worked well this year, and note the lessons learned to modify activities for the next year.
The artifacts submitted for the Chapter Circle Awards provides more in-depth information and documentation. Special thanks to the Communications and Programs Directors and all of the Board of Directors for the INCOSE – Chesapeake Chapter and all of our volunteers and sponsors in making this another rewarding year for the SE and STEM communities that the Chapter supports.