eFlash! 2016-09

2016 AGM — Annual General Meeting / AGA 2016 — Assemblée générale annuelle

Report on the Status of eContact!

[ return to the index / Agenda ]

Many important changes were implemented over the course of the past year. We are able to start paying authors a modest sum for their contributions, and have made (and continue to make) very important headway in catching up on delayed issues (as mentioned in the President’s Report) that will allow us to set the journal on a more regular and reliable publication schedule starting in Fall 2016. In September 2015, a massive upgrade to the design, functioning and navigability of the CEC’s website (cec.sonus.ca) was launched and the journal was moved to its own dedicated domain (econtact.ca); despite now having two separate addresses there is seamless integration of the website of the CEC and the journal. For 2015–16, the journal’s webstats are up 40% from the previous year — in fact we broke 100,000 page views (103,239, to be exact, for a monthly average of 8603), thanks to the website upgrade and the extremely popular issue 17.4 —Analogue and Modular Synthesis.

The Canada Council for the Arts had previously issued warnings to eContact! two years in a row and this year we received no further warnings (which could have meant a complete cessation of funding for the journal) but nevertheless the grant we applied for (to fund the publication of four issues of volume 19 in 2016–17) was refused. It was not possible to reach the CCA agent prior to the AGM for clearer information, but we will certainly maintain close dialogue with her over the coming year to rectify to the best of our capacity whatever was deemed to be wrong or insufficient by the jury.

The bottom line is that we have analysed the situation and finances and can — with some judicious adjustments in our expenditures — survive this year without Canada Council funding while avoiding any cuts to salaries, author and translation fees and other essential items, or to key expenses for the journal, thereby avoiding having to make any compromises to the quality, breadth or size of the journal issues.

In order to accommodate the coming year with no funding from the Canada Council for the Arts for the CEC’s online journal, eContact!, the following approach was agreed upon by the Board:

• Avoid all non-essential spending (e.g., ads placed in journals, software and hardware upgrades);
• Move $3000 that was previously set aside for SONUS development to this year’s eContact! budget;
• Use $2500 for the 2016–17 year from the Capital Fund to cover any remaining essential expenses;
• Seek various ways over the course of the year to reduce or recover the monies used from the Capital Fund;
• Explore other sources of funding to continue to reduce eContact!’s dependence on CCA funding.

This approach — as well as the very important funding increase awarded to the CEC by the SOCAN Foundation in 2016, as mentioned in the Treasurer’s Report — will allow us to continue to maintain a decent level for this publication cycle and concentrate on fixing, changing or improving whatever needs to be done to better our position for next year’s CCA application.

Further, funding for the continued development of SONUS (which will certainly be much more than $3000) should in any case be taken from dedicated funding that Yves and I have already begun to look into and will continue to research over the 2016–17 fiscal year.

jef chippewa
Administrative co-Director of the CEC
Berlin, Saturday, 13 August 2016