Those of you who are members of the American Choral Directors Association have received or are soon to receive your September issue of the Choral Journal.  In his column Executive Director Tim Sharp states

 

and goes on to say, “I could not agree more”.  Maybe you find that vision just a little hazy at the moment, but allow me to share with you what I am doing as I “write” the first draft of this blog.

 

Sidebar.  Why the quotes?  Last March I wrote one of these blogs on my phone while standing in line registering for the ACDA national conference in Chicago.  Today, I have literally foregone the whole typing route (which I do not do well anyway) and am simply dictating the blog into my phone as it translates my speech into text.  I upload the text and format it on the blog before posting.  Neat, huh?

 

Anyway, I am in Oklahoma City at the national ACDA offices meeting with Martin Knowles and Jose Tellez. Martin is the longtime Manager of ChoralNet and architect of the ChoralNet system.  Jose is the new technology expert in Oklahoma City and comes to ACDA from Sprint, with expertise in both mobile computing and corporate database management.  We are setting goals and policies for the future use of technology to assist ACDA to meet its stated goals.

 

There are two main reasons why ChoralNet Communities have not taken off as the medium for ACDA communications.

 

One is that they are still under construction. The user interface and consequent usefulness of Communities is still being developed and refined.  Last month I began a discussion on the Community Editors Community regarding this issue and it generated many potentially game-changing possibilities which we now must make happen.  These include such things as:

These are all ChoralNet technical problems and we’re working on implementing such things that will make ChoralNet look and feel more user-friendly. 

 

The other major stumbling block is the fact that many ACDA members are simply not registered on ChoralNet.  I am happy to announce that this issue will soon be a non-issue.  By February of 2012, all ACDA members will automatically be registered on ChoralNet.  In fact, our plan is to have a single logon and password for both entities.  How can this be?  Our two technical geniuses will have both ACDA.org and ChoralNet.org running on the same server by October.  In fact, you will see a dramatic increase in speed on both sites with this transfer to a new server when this happens.  They have already developed a plan and method whereby the two separate systems will become one over the next year and this merger will begin with the membership databases.  By late 2011, those of you who are registered on both ACDA and ChoralNet will have the option of merging your two separate registrations. This option will end by February and at that time, those with two registrations will be merged and those ACDA members who were not previously registered on ChoralNet will be.  Sounds fairly draconian, but it solves some major organizational issues that have plagued both ChoralNet and ACDA for several years.

 

ACDA needs a better communications system.  Leadership often relies on email to push information to members and to elicit information from members.  The problem with that?  Privacy and liability.  Not all people understand how to use mass mailings and email links in a manner which hides individual emails from all others, thereby spreading personal contact information. So let’s use Facebook, yes? Nothing wrong with Facebook.  I use it to communicate with my choirs – although here again some refuse to get a Facebook account.  But the choral profession will never control Facebook, et al.  Those commercial sites will never be responsive to our specific needs. They are geared towards personal and social communication. Furthermore, they are large enough targets to be infinitely appealing to repeated and continuous hacking.  Through ChoralNet Communities we are building a safe, professional, and useful environment by which to conduct our business.  I am more and more convinced we can do this and now we have set a clear path to that goal.