HFES Presidential Town Hall (June 2022) | Bonus Episode

 
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to Rhfas Presidential Town Hall, all for June 2022. No matter if you're joining us live or watching or listening to this recording later, thank you all so much for being here. HFS has invited me to host today. My name is Nick Rome. I host a weekly Human Factors podcast. And I'm joined today by the president of HFPS, Chris Reid, by the President's elect, Karolyn Sunrik. We'll also hear from Tom Albin about HFPS membership and Farzan sauce and gohar on the plan for this year's annual meeting. Also special thank you to some of the HFPS staff who are helping behind the scenes today. We got a great town hall and timely, relevant topics about membership and the annual meeting. And we'll be addressing some of your questions, comments and concerns a little bit later. But first, I just want to level set with everybody so everyone has up to date. This is a town hall open to everyone, members and non members alike. No matter which category you fall in, we are super glad you are here. We are broadcasting this live across many platforms right now, across the Human Factors Cast channels as well as the HFPS official channels. You can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch. And one note if you can't stick around for the entire town hall today. The event will be available to watch on all those platforms right after we're done. We also be distributing the audio version of this discussion on the Human Factors Cast podcast feed. One last important note as we make our way through the conversation today, we ask that no matter where you're watching listening, leave your comments in the chat. We will see everything on our end, so we may address them towards the end and flag them throughout our discussion. So feel free to ask them at any time. All right, give these guys some tough questions. We want to hear the tough questions. I've gone on long enough. I'm going to pass it over to Carolyn to go through some of the society announcements. Carolyn, take it away. Thank you. And thank you, Caitlin. So, as you heard, we are going to be hearing today from two very important volunteers in HFS, tom Albin, who's the chair of our membership committee, and Farzan Sasangohar, who is the annual meeting technical program chair. And so, Caitlin, next slide, please. Great. So what we're going to be talking about today very briefly, our agenda is updates on announcements, which you're also probably seeing those through the bulletin. When you get that, if you're not getting the bulletin, I just want to bring this up because this came up not too long ago. If you're a member of HFCs and you're not seeing emails from us, it may be because you have something set in your HFPS membership that you don't want to receive emails. If you don't receive emails from the society, you'll miss the bulletin, announcements on events and all of that. So if you're wondering, hey, I'm a member, but I'm not hearing anything from HFPS. Check to see how your settings are or contact there's information at HFS. I think that would be the email address, but check on the website for that if you're missing information about the Society. On this slide, you can see our photos from our prior to town hall. So this is the third one that we're having, the last one, which is the picture on the right. There were people who make our outreach division go and are very active in that. Caitlin, next please.

Great. And Nick mentioned to put comments in the chat, but we'd also like to hear from you after the town hall is over. And so this is a link to that, and I think that'll be someplace else too, right, Nick? I mean, people don't have to very quickly write down what this link is. I hope we'll get that to you. No, yeah, the link will be in the description in the comments of this episode or this town hall. Great, thanks a lot. Okay. Caitlin, next slide. So we just kind of want to remind folks of some of the benefits of belonging to the society. Whether you are looking for employment or whether you're looking for talent in the area of human factors, ergonomics, or user experience, HFDs has a career center that is a great place to look and to advertise for professionals. So that's just a little reminder of one of the benefits of membership. Caitlin, next slide, please. And as we're talking about membership here, we are a primarily volunteer organization. And if there is something that you want to get involved with, my gosh, I think you're not going to get any complaints from us about stepping in and contributing your great ideas and your time and your effort. There are lots of opportunities. If you've ever looked@our.org chart, you know that there's lots of committees, and if something picks your interest, we would love to have you contact the chair of the committee that sparks your interest. Or if you aren't seeing something that you think, boy, there's really a gap here, contact Chris, contact me and talk with us about your idea. That's how we stay new and fresh. So there's a link here which you can reach from the HFPS website in terms of getting involved. There are lists of volunteer opportunities there, but if you don't see anything that interests you there, again, that's not the end of it. There are other ways that you can get involved, so please get in touch. Next slide. Caitlin so, coming up, elections. So we've had our nomination cycle and the slate is getting prepared there, and we are going to be having our elections coming up in July, and elections, voting matters, I won't go into anything political here. Just say no what happens. Things can be tight and things can go one way or another. So when people vote, that's a very important way of expressing your interest and your involvement in the society. So also with a preview to next year, think about whether or not putting yourself out there nominating. Yourself? Nominating somebody that you think could be a great contributor to HF. Yes, we are always looking for new people to come into leadership positions and of course, those aren't limited to the Executive Council. We have all these technical groups that have leadership opportunities. That's where I got my start. Newsletter editor of the industrial ergonomics, Technical Group when I was in college. Still, that was my start. And there are so many leadership opportunities within this organization. Next slide. So, upcoming events. Our annual meeting is coming up and we are going to hear more about that from farzan in just a little bit. We also have Ergo X which is paired up with the annual meeting and we're really excited about these two upcoming events. And Caitlin, if you could press the enter button one more time, there's going to be there you go. So we've got other stuff going on. You don't have to wait until October. We have a lot of events coming up, a lot of webinars that are planned in the next several weeks and months. So please, that's a great way to keep apprised of upcoming learning opportunities. And again, if you don't see something that we're offering and you say, hey, I'd like to learn about this, get a hold of us and let us know. Or if you're a person who has information that you think other people would benefit from learning about, you got an idea for a webinar, get a hold of us, let us know about it. Next slide please. So who is HFES? Just in case you are dialing in for the first time. HFES is an organization for practitioners and researchers in the area of human factors and Ergonomics. It's where we share ideas, it's where we share our research, it's where we share our technical expertise, which is applied in so many different areas. Yeah, that's all I'll say about that because I know we're short on time. So Caitlin, next slide please. And who are we? Although we were formed in 1000 967, please don't think that we are stayed and stodgy because we just have a really long track record of effective outreach, effective education. And as Nick mentioned, we are global. We have member organizations throughout the world, we have members throughout the world, we have special interest groups which are technical groups, we have affinity groups which are not listed on the slide. We got to get that added. We have a number of graduate programs that are accredited through HFDs and people who are looking at graduate school can find programs described on the website. Yeah, I'll let it go with that. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Chris. Thanks for bringing us in, Carolyn. And thanks Nick, for hosting us and touching on Star Wars, one of my favorite topics every so often. So let's jump into the next slide please. Carolyn brought us in talking about what's HFES and how human factors and ergonomics ties into the world. This basically brings us along those lines. You know, you have this circle of life, or this ecosystem as I like to call it. It's looking at it from the perspective of what can be produced from the research side of the house and then transmitted over to the practice side of the house. So you see this continuous circle of life that essentially goes from creating needs and opportunities to providing solutions, providing people and resources. So that's something that we should always think about when we're doing this type of activity. How is HFE or human factors in Ergonomics leading to help the world, help the US. Help our state or wherever it may be? Next slide, please. All right, let's talk about a couple of highlights that have come out of hi of the in this last quarter. First off, congratulations to those of you who have been accepted to the annual meeting. You will be hearing more of that from farzan, so I don't want to take too much of its thunder, but congrats to you guys. Also, congratulations to the new collapse of government Relations Policy Fellows. You guys represent the best of us on Capitol Hill for the US government side. So congratulations to that new class and good luck. And then there's also thinking about the things that we've done for write ups this year. We've been kicking off a lot of almost monthly write ups for diversity, equity, and inclusion. So you see a couple of items that are on there. We're basically following the diversity calendar. So this month is Pride Month. So thinking about how human factors and Ergonomics contribute to all these different efforts when it comes to diversity, adopting governance, culture. So thinking about the culture statement that recently went out, this has gone across to our leadership side of the house. We want to make sure that when we're coming to the table, such as at the executive council level, we're thinking about accommodations, diversity, inclusion, integrity, all these different attributes that should be considered when you're running an organization such as Hrs. On the leadership side, this governance statement brings us a reminder of how we contribute to the table. Now, the other thing that's on here was we issued a policy statement on reducing medical errors by focusing more attention on human factors in health care. Now that was based on some recent things that have come out on the legal side of the house and public media. It also led to what showed up on the healthcare symposium side of the house with a discussion on applying human factors and Ergonomics to the redondo bot medication error case. And again, this is why we have to stay pertinent with what's happening in the public setting, with what's happening in real life that relevance matters and human factors can contribute. Then this month I also had the ability to reach out to a past president, Dr. Bill Merris. The two of us came together for the National Academies Board on Human Systems Integration and talked about human centered design of exoskeletons and emerging technology, where the Boss organization has the ability to contribute towards synergizing US government agencies around this capability. The laptop here is our Human Factors and Health Care Journal. That's our newest journal that's joining a number of other journals. It recently hit over 3600 downloads. So that just came out in December. So congratulations to the Healthcare symposium. Excuse me, the Healthcare Journal. Next slide, please.

This is the last of the updates that I'll go into. One of the things that we've been looking at, our Memorandums of Understanding, reaching out to our technical organizations that are out there outside of the Human Factors and Ergonomics domain and thinking about ways that we can contribute and learn from them at the same time. So the Applied Ergonomic Society, International Pediatric Simulation Society, and the Society Petroleum Engineers are folks that we are now newly contributing and learning from at the same time. So congratulations to the teams that were behind these. And thank you for what you guys are doing with representing Human Factors and Ergonomics in the world. Another thing to think about, our service agreement. So accessibility and inclusion is an important asset of Human Factors and Ergonomics. We recently signed on with Kineski. That organization is looking at ways to contribute more accessibility and inclusion towards not only our in person events, but also online activities. And then there was the public relations firm. So this one is our newest organization that we're working through, Tech Image. We're looking at improving the capability of human factors and Ergonomics in the public domain beyond government relations. So thinking of social media platforms, traditional media platforms, this is going to bring us out more into the world and have us do more interaction there. The last ones touch on our in work. So we're looking at an MoU or Memorandum of Understanding with the National Safety Council, currently looking at interviewing firms to elevate our digital ecosystem, engaging in updates to the Code of Ethics and the Code of Conduct. And we're also looking at continuing the work with these task forces that are listed on here. So from the award side of the house, mental Health user experience or UX standards implementation, website updates as well as environment and sustainability. All good opportunities. Next slide, please. Many have seen this, but not many have. So this is our strategic roadmap. It talks about all the things that have happened under my watch as President, under my three year term and transitioning into Carolyn's term. So it's an evolving document. It's a living document. You can see items in black that are completed, items in blue, and items still not yet in work. Today we're going to be talking about membership and programming or some of the events that we're doing. So you can see that one thing we're thinking about at the Executive Council level is ways that we can contribute to enhancing the value of what we do to not only our members and those who help us in leadership positions, but also those who are stakeholders, partners, and those who are outside of the organization. So advocacy is important there. That's what we talked about last time. Diversity, equity, inclusion. Things that we do within our committee organizations as well as our operations standpoint. Next slide, please.

All right. Now we're getting into the meat and the potatoes for what we're doing today. So the Executive Council sits right in that big blue box in the middle. It's made up of many different committees. Outside of the big blue box, you see our divisions. Last time we came on for our quarterly update, we talked about things happening on the Outreach division. This time we're going to be touching on internal affairs as well as education. Next time we come around, you'll see folks on the scientific public relations side of the house excuse me, publication side of the house, as well as what's happening on standards. So next slide will lead us into where we are today with Tom and with Farzone. So Tom is coming at us from the membership side of the House. He's looking at it from the membership committee. Farz on, of course, coming from the annual meeting side of the House. Let's go ahead and jump right into it. I want to take up more time. Tom, are you on? Do you want to go ahead and kick us off in that topic? Thanks, Caitlin. I'm here. Yeah, I'll jump in here, though. I do want to mention, so Carolyn brought it up earlier. Right. There's plenty of volunteer opportunities within HFES, but then there's also sort of these higher level holding office and actually boating, I guess. Question is, how can we sort of encourage more participation from HFPS members with the governance of HFBs?

Sure. One of the things that exist in our current organization is that only full members can vote. So people like associate and affiliate members, early career, professional members, don't have the ability to vote or to hold office. So the membership committee has asked the executive council to think about and to revise the membership classes so that more members can vote and hold office within HFPS. I think we really need to hear those groups of people represented hear their voice within the society. Yeah, I agree. I think that's going to be a good way forward, and hopefully their votes will count equally as much as full members. My two senses. That's me. Absolutely.

I mentioned it earlier. Right. We are an international organization. We have folks from all over the world watching, listening right now. How can we engage with these Human Factors Ergonomics professionals outside of the US. Yes, I think that's really critical for us to do so that we have a good sense of what's going on in the rest of the world and for people to learn about what we're doing too. So one of the things that the Membership Committee has done is we've asked the Executive Council to consider creating a new membership category, and we tentatively call that the corresponding members. These would be individuals who are members of the Ergonomics or Human Factors Professional Society in their home country, but we'd establish a relationship with them so that they could be corresponding members with HFPS. We asked them to pay a nominal fee, and that would include benefits such as access to the journals, to read the bulletin, all of those kinds of things. So that's how we'd really like to have more influence and more input from the rest of the world just to get these corresponding member classes set up. Yeah, that's great. I know there's so many great folks worldwide who could be part of this organization. The Society, I think providing those avenues and easier ways to get involved for sort of less out of pocket. Right? I think that's awesome. I'm going to ask you some tough questions here. Membership, it's something that I like to bring up at almost every town hall. HFES membership, it's been decreasing, right? Has it been decreasing? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, it's a bad news, good news kind of situation. The bad news is Jess membership has decreased, some of that's likely due to Covet. But the trend was evident before Covet hit us, and between 2014 to 2021, membership decreased at about 4% per year. The good news is that that trend seems to be slowing, if not reversing. For example, if we look at year over year data, may 2021 to May 2022, that rate is slowed. We've lost about less than 2% of membership. But if we look at the month over month data, our new members have been joining at a great rate. It's up 58% last month from the monthly in the preceding year. So from May 2021 to May 2022, we've seen an increase in about 58%. So that's good. That's great to hear that. We're kind of swinging around. Hopefully we're on the uptrend now or will be soon. The real question is, how do we get more people involved with HFPS? How do we recruit more HFS members? Yeah, we could talk about this a lot, but there are several things going on. I think that we do a reasonably good job of recruiting new people, but what we need to work on is retaining members. In other words, one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is our people dropping away after they've been in the Society for a year or two because they're not finding what they wanted there. If we look again at the change from May 2021 to May of this year, we've retained about 76% of our members. So that's why it's really critical for us to build mechanisms to find out what people expect, what people want from HFES membership, and then do our best to deliver that so that they find membership in HFES, something that's valuable and that they want to maintain. Yeah, myself included. I think there's a lot of members and prospective members who really want something back, like, what's in it for me? Right. What sort of benefits do folks generally do you hear about what do they want from HFES membership? Well, two of the big things we ran some surveys last fall of members and non members, and the two things that really jumped out were practical training, things that I can apply on the job, maybe, that I didn't learn in the classroom. And the other topic was networking opportunities. So with the membership committee has initiated some practical training. We were able to negotiate with a couple of UX training providers and get discounts on trading costs for HFES members. Those are programs. One is a diploma program that they consider roughly equivalent to an associate degree. The other is a shorter term boot camp kind of event. But both give certificates. Both help people work on portfolios of work so that they have something in hand when they go to a job interview that helps them to stand out from the rest of the crowd. We're working on getting some similar kinds of training. I think Tom Rowell mentioned that in the comment line a while ago. We're looking at practical, physical, ergo training courses that are offered by some of the universities in the US. Berkeley, Ohio State, Michigan and North Carolina are the ones that come to mind. So we hope to provide a webinar like the one we did for UX training that will acquaint people, introduce them to the training that's available, and help them make the link if that's what they're looking for. So we also want to I'll just go ahead and keep on going here. We also want to find out what people want. So we understand networking. It's pretty straightforward to set up networking events and meetings, for example, but we don't know what the topics are that people want or who they want to meet or what they want to talk about. So we're in the process of asking people about that. So one of the things that we're going to be doing is at the annual meeting, we're going to have volunteers going around asking you, what would you like to see, what would you like to hear about what networking topics? Those kinds of things. So if somebody comes up to you at the annual meeting and ask those questions, please give us your input, because that's what we'll use to develop offerings in the future. I got a couple of follow up questions here. Right. So we're planning to ask at the annual meeting, what about all the other members that might want to do a networking event? Virtually? Are we planning any ways to reach out to them to see kind of what a virtual networking event might look like? Yes, we definitely want to do that. We know that that's something that we could be providing year round. So we are trying to explore that to find out how we can set up events, how we can identify topics, and how we can put people in touch with one another when they want to network.

Great. So is there anything else that we need to know about sort of membership at this time? What else you got for us? Anything? Yeah, one of the things that we heard that people want or need is ideas about how to write for social media, whether that's a technical group or affinity group, or a student chapter or a local chapter. So we're in the process of planning a webinar. We'll talk about that. We'll have a couple of people present about how to tell a story on social media, how to write for social media. One of the great suggestions we got from a committee member was to contact some journalists who routinely write for social media. So we've recruited journalists to come and talk to us about how we might want to structure our social media content.

Great. Well, thanks for breaking down membership. What's going on with membership? If you have any questions about membership questions for Tom, drop them in the chat. We'll get to them at the Q and A portion. Now I'm going to bring in Farzan to talk about this, your annual meeting. And this is going to be a fun discussion, I think. I really want to know what's going on at this year's annual meeting in Atlanta. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Of course, Nick. So just want to start with a little bit of overall stats. This was a great year for us. We received more than 600 674 submissions in seven different submission categories. Really glad to report all of our 26 technical groups are represented. They have submissions, and they're going to be in this year's program. So it's a very deep and with a great breath program. All these submissions, very double blind, peer reviewed. Like to thank our great community for volunteering again year after year. This year we had 1630 reviews done for these papers, and we accepted about 300 lecture presentations, about 30 discussion panels. We had some symposiums. We had eight workshops accepted and some alternative format presentations, and more than 100 posters accepted. These papers were due last week, and in the process of putting them together in our proceedings, registration is open since June 1. We're expecting a great turnout this year because it's in Atlanta. I'm going to talk about line a little bit. Deadline for the discounted rate is August 5, so please register early to take advantage of this great discount. And Atlanta this year is going to be great. It's one of the most exciting meeting destinations in my opinion. Atlanta is very accessible, very student friendly. It's an airline hub, so it's easy to get to cities, very walkable, offers great dining options. We're working with our partners to form a local committee to put together some really great technical tours. As you know, seven out of Fortune 100 companies are headquartered in Atlanta metro area of Coca Cola, Home Depot, Ups, Delta, at, and T. And all these companies have major HFE or user experience teams and efforts. So what's new this year? It's a really exciting year because we have some new initiatives this year. We're going to have a planning session every day of the conference week. So thanks to Chris Reid's leadership, we'll have some great speakers this year, some really nice panels to kick off every day with some topics that everybody's interested in practitioneriented topics, diversity, equity, inclusion, type of topics. So it's going to be a great event in that sense every day. We're going to have some major speakers showing up starting day for us. We're also inviting late breaking submissions this year. You're going to see a call coming out in July, and we'll accept submissions in August. And these late breaking presentations are really capturing latest breakthrough in human factors, economics, research and practice. That should be recent, it should be innovative, there should be high impact, and the format is going to be a little bit different than our general lecture presentations. They're going to have much shorter abstracts and shorter presentations, and submissions are not going to be published in the proceedings. But regardless, it's going to be a very important event for us. We are going to have two of those, one for general late breaking and one for our UX Day, our user experience day. Then this year we'll have a special session dedicated to society awards to recognize our wardrobes and fellows. This new session is going to take place as part of our welcome opening reception on Monday afternoon. It's going to include the major awards this year. We're going to have some acceptance speeches. We traditionally have great food and drinks this time, potentially even some live music and DJ. Special thanks to the awards ceremony committee that Chris put together. Chris, Carolyn, Ron, Boring, Nancy Stone, and H of your staff. They're working really hard to make sure this is an exciting event, so you really don't want to miss this opening reception this year. In addition to that, we have our receptions, a new reception this year for early career and practitioners together on Tuesday. And as usual, we have our student reception on Thursday. So many opportunities for social networking and having fun at the annual event. We've also been working very closely with our Council of Affinity Groups to make sure this year's annual meetings are most inclusive, most tolerant, most accessible meetings we've ever had. We're going to have several Di related activities, at least four really good panel discussions on Di that I can recall, perhaps more. This year we'll have an onboard person on site. We're going to have a new printed program that emphasizes relevant program. You can have a new app that's going to have searchable Di content. And then Society has recently hired an accessibility consultant, as Chris mentioned, and you're going to see more details of that coming out now still. Wow, that was a lot of new stuff. Yeah. And there's one more. Oh yeah, it's been listening to your feedback members. We had a lot of comments on the app and it's kind of ironic to have an app with poor usability for Human Factors Economic Society. So we've been listening. So we're changing our meetings app this time. This new app. We have a new vendor and I think our members are going to really enjoy this new app. It's going to make it really easy to find sessions to create an agenda, has some really cool networking features. You're going to have a virtual business card they can just scan, has direct messaging, bulletin boards, and most importantly, it does much better on real time updates and alerting members on changes, daily changes. So yeah, so that's some of the highlights of the new stuff we're going to do. Can you tell us a little bit about like I said, there's a lot of new stuff. That's awesome. I love the direction we're going. Can you tell us about some of the stuff that exists already that might just need a little reminder on? Of course. So we're going to continue the tradition of having our Usability and User Experience Day. This year is going to be on the Thursday of the conference, an entire day full of deep program, really interesting panel discussions and lecture presentations and a kickoff plenary session on userbell and user experience. On Monday, we're going to have a full day worth of event on our Student Career and Professional Development Day. So full day program dedicated to our student members on topic related to careers and human factors transitions, a lot of opportunities to do networking. And this is in addition to our really nice workshops that day. You say we're going to have eight excellent workshops, some half day, some full day. We're going to have many mentorship events and activities as Tom mentioned, and various social events. So please stand by. We're going to start talking about these events as we get closer to the annual meeting. Awesome. Hey, question for you. I heard that there might be an independent human Factors media outlet broadcasting from the event. Is there anything that you can comment publicly at this time about that? I've heard those rumors. Okay. Too yes. So I think we can actually make the announcement here that we're going to have Nick on board this year on at least the first day of the conference, if not more to do, a little bit of

broadcasting. So he's going to be there doing some co broadcasting, doing some really interesting interviews with some of the speakers, with some of the leadership. I think some of those international members who can't unfortunately attend, can take advantage of this opportunity to know of what's going on, at least on the first day of the conference. And I'm sure Nick's going to do a lot more than that and going to summarize this in other sessions he's going to record. And I have more good news for international members that's going to come out later. Unfortunately, I can't pick the news now, but there's more for international members. Awesome. That was totally unplanned, by the way. That was not in his prepared remarks or anything like that. I just kind of threw it on them. Anyway, thank you for going over this year's annual meeting. I think right now we should bring everybody back in for a Q and A. So let's get everybody back in here. We got some great questions in the chat. Want to make sure we have an opportunity to address some of these. I'm going to pull Richard's question first here. This one's a heavy hitter. You all ready for this one? Last year, the HFPS Executive Council set forth a progressive action plan to explore and address diversity and inclusion. The plan included a number of measures HFES leadership intends to take and increase diversity and equity. Aside from sorry, I'm bringing it up. Aside from the creation of a scholarship, affinity groups, and celebrating designated months, what other tangible actions have been taken or are planned to increase diversity in HFES membership? It's a great question. Who wants to take it? So I can start out, but I'm going to have other people chime in here too. One thing I want to say, yes, it's hard to tell because we have not updated the website that goes to the other comment there, which I apologize for, that we aren't doing a better job at keeping folks informed about what we're doing in this area. And so some of the things we'll mention so in Rashad's comments said affinity group. Well, I want to tell you what some of the affinity groups are doing because that is a piece of it. Starting the affinity groups is one thing. Then what are they actually doing? They're doing some really great things, particularly around mentoring. A couple of affinity groups are developing mentoring programs, and they're actually taking different approaches, so it'll be interesting to see what patterns seem to work, or do they both work equally well? Some of them are more like small groups, mentoring groups, and some are more of a pairing of one to one. So we'll see how those work. And I think those models will be really useful for sharing with the TGS as another mentoring other groups that could be doing mentoring as well. We had the first Seed grant opportunity for the Intersection of Human Factors and Action against or Anti Racism Action. And those C grants, we awarded two of those last year. So those folks, in terms of timing, are going to be finishing up. These are one year in length. Those folks are going to be finishing up sometime later, like summer, early fall. They're going to be presenting at next year's annual meeting what their projects are about, what they learned. And then this year, we're running this again. We've had eight proposals submitted, so that's super exciting, and we're going to be starting the review process of those. Please watch for a call for reviewers. What we do is we look to see what the areas are that are being touched on in the proposals, and then we put out a call for people with expertise in those areas. Do not have to be a member of HFES to be a reviewer. And so that's another way that we're expanding and getting people involved and expanding, basically putting money where our mouth is. Those are just a couple of things. Farzan, you mentioned at the annual meeting, certainly there's two or three, at least presentations that are specifically either from the Diversity Inclusion Committee or one or more of the affinity groups, correct? Absolutely. At least four discussion panels that are larger sessions, so they're getting a lot of attention. And Carolyn, on top of that, this year the HF Prize, which is one of our most prestigious scholarly awards we give out, is on the topic of the I. This is inviting our community to push scholarly work done on the EI. Then I'll just add one more item. Beyond that, we have the Listening and acting webinar series that's been going on since 2020. And so every couple of months, we add a new webinar onto that series. And that's looking at, again, topics related to dei from perspective of race, ethnicity, women, socioeconomical perspective. All these are different ways that we can touch on that topic.

Awesome answers, everyone. Appreciate it. I want to remind everyone that's watching, listening. If you have any questions for HFPS leadership, please drop them in the chat. We got a couple of minutes left here. I do have one more question for you all. This one's about college students here. This one's by Katie on LinkedIn. Many college students I have met either don't know about HFES or don't know they can become members or what they could even get out of a student membership. How do you think HF Es can attract more student membership and get students to get more involved? Tom, I know you had mentioned some of this, allowing them to vote in some of these leadership positions. Do you want to add anything else to this one? And just to be clear, I don't think the proposal was to give student members a vote. We absolutely need what interests two members to that effect. You have involved a couple of student member chapters about what could we be doing on social media to increase promotion and awareness of humans. And ergonomics, I think it's one of the things that struggle with as a society is to push out information about the knowledge and those that we have and how that would impact organizations and functionality of systems that other people set up. So I guess that's kind of a rambling answer. Absolutely. We need to get an increased earnest amongst students. We think that one way to do that is by developing more social media and pushing that out so that students are aware. And to that end, we've definitely involved student and local chapters in the discussions of how we manage that. And Tom, I'll add something else that we've been working on in the last couple of years for students, which is with regards to expanding educational opportunities towards nontraditional paths. So if you think of things like dei when related to historically black colleges and universities, so creating brand new curriculum for HBCUs that traditionally wasn't there for human factors and ergonomics, so we're starting to edge into that with some of the HBCUs, especially as we enter into Atlanta, which has some heavy Hpcus in its presence. And then beyond that, thinking about Stem societies. So science, technology, engineering, math societies that are in the dei format already. So we're thinking about like asus the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. They have an MoU with us that we signed with them last year. And we're working with organizations beyond that such as looking at for the Hispanic professional Organizations or looking on the Society for Agent Scientists and Engineers or Sweet Society for Women Engineers. Lots of opportunities to expand again into nontraditional formats, but blending these different worlds to again, look at how to improve access for human factors and ergonomics. So one thing I'll mention, I'll just jump in. I know we're kind of short on time and I have to say I'm not a social media person, but I heard about this and saw examples of this from somebody who's an industrial hygienist and this lady was making little Instagram videos or tweeting, I don't know which. Sorry I'm going to sound so ancient, but she would make like little short videos and basically I'm an industrial hygienist. This is what I do and they're very short. And then she talks about the very interesting and exciting things that she does and of course she's passionate about what she does. So I think that you got to go to where students are and the web is not exactly where they are, but that's where our information is. So at least if we could direct them to our website through things like short videos that they would see as they're searching through Instagram, looking for stuff that's interesting I think that could be one way to contact folks. All right, we have one more question, and then I think we'll get out of here. This one's by Judy on LinkedIn. Has a memorandum of understanding with BCPE been explored? What's going on with that? Who's taking this? A thing called The Alliance, and it's got some really long name, and I can't even ever remember the whole length of it, but it's basically an organization that's been formed through with FPE So Foundation, BCPE, and HFPS. And we're actually looking to make an announcement about this. We're actually looking for a couple of people from HFPS to represent HFPS in this alliance. It's basically the thing that they're focused on, obviously, is practitioners and certification. So if you're somebody that might be interested in representing HFPS in this alliance, that is, again made up of folks from BCPE, FPE, and HFES, get a hold of me, let me know. All right. With that, let's go ahead and wrap it up for today. We sincerely hope that you enjoy this town hall discussion today. If you like this, we invite you to join us next time for our next quarterly town hall, and join us the annual meeting. As a reminder, there is a link to a survey in the description so that you can let us know how we did today, what you might want to hear from us in the future. I want to thank all the distinguished panelists today and everyone else on the HFPS side of the house helping out behind the scenes, making this happen. Always find the latest from Hfps@hfps.org. We want to encourage you to join the HFS LinkedIn group and take a look at those HFS bulletins in your email. Keep up to date with some of the society news. As for me, I've been your moderator or host. Nick Roam. You can find me on Humanfactors Cast, our weekly podcast, where we talk about the latest news from around the human factors world. You can also find me on social media at Nick Rome. Thank you again, everyone, for tuning into this town hall. At the end of my regular show, I like to end it by saying it depends, because in Human Factors, we all know that is the de facto answer for everything. On the count of three, will everyone join me in saying it depends? Ready? Three, two, one. It depends. Human Factors Cast brings you the best in Human Factors news, interviews, conference coverage, and overall fun conversations into each and every episode we produce. But we can't do it without you. The Human Factors Cast network is 100% listener supported. All the funds that go into running the show come from our listeners. Our patrons are our priority, and we want to ensure we're giving back to you for supporting us. 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