An
Introduction:
The
Technical Activities Board, TAB, is one of the major boards under the Board of
Directors. Under TAB are the 38 technical societies arranged into 10
Divisions. The societies range in size from the newest societies with about
1,000 members, many smaller and medium societies with around 3,000 to 10,000
members to the larger societies with sizes between 20,000 to over 60,000
members. These 38 societies are divided between the 10 divisions so that each
division has roughly equal total membership. Our division covers seven
societies and this election is for the Division Director of our division who
will first have one year as “director-in-training” with our current
Division Director, Roger Sudbury.
Of
course, nothing can be organized this simply. The professional interests of
our members are very broad and there are many technical fields that map onto
more than one society. As an example, everyone is a consumer of computer
technology while much of the core computer technology is developed by members
of the Computer Society. Sometimes major developments in one field come from
work supporting another field – as an extreme example, the World Wide Web
was invented by a Physicist developing computer systems in a high-energy
physics laboratory, Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. To support these members and
technical fields whose interests do not map into an existing society, there
are also technical councils that are supported by groups of societies.
Currently there are seven technical councils. More can be found at http://www.ieee.org/web/societies/home/index.html
