IFD&TC Program Coordinator – Role Description
The International Field Directors & Technologies Conference elects 4 individuals to assist with program creation for each year’s conference. Each of these chair positions are two years in duration, and are offset so that two are elected each year at the conference.
These positions are referred to as:
• Large Shop Field Program Coordinator
• Small Shop Field Program Coordinator
• Large Shop Technical Program Coordinator
• Small Shop Technical Program Coordinator
The IFD&TC Charter states:
The members of the Governing Board shall be elected by a majority vote of the active members during the business meeting held as part of the annual conference. Whenever possible, the in-coming program chairs should be from an organization of comparable size of the outgoing program chairs (with the goal of having representation among the two chairs of the small/medium and large organizations).
The term of office of each program chairperson shall be two years, staggered so that one person from each pair of offices is elected each year. Each year the newly elected chairs shall assist the second-year chairpersons, who shall be primarily and jointly responsible for planning the following year’s conference. It is the responsibility of incumbents to train the newly-elected individuals to ensure smooth transition at the time of future election or replacement.
The complete IFD&TC charter is available at: https://ifdtc.org/charter/
Expectations of Program Coordinators:
• Attend the conference regularly, and in particular, attend each of the two years of their term as chairperson.
• Assist with all aspects of planning and running the conference.
• Act as an ambassador for the conference to other organizations such as AAPOR, AASRO, or FedCASIC.
Primary Duties of Program Coordinators:
• Participate in two planning conference calls per month from September through May of each year.
• Organize and attend a meeting or conference call (one for Field, and one for Tech) in September of each year to agree on a list of suggested topics to be published with the call for program participation in October.
• Attend program planning meeting each year in January following the close of the abstract submission process. The purpose of the meeting is to organize abstract submissions into cohesive breakout sessions and ensure that relevant and emerging topics are covered at each conference. This meeting is approximately 2 days in length, and is often hosted by an IFD&TC member organization, but moves to different cities depending upon which organization agrees to host the meeting. The employer of each program chair is responsible for all travel and lodging costs for this meeting, and agrees to allow the chair to attend this meeting when they confirm their support of the staff person during the nomination process. The program is expected to be complete in draft form at the close of this meeting.
• Research and recruit keynote speakers, one Field and one Tech, each year.
• Recruit additional presenters or panelists based on the needs of the program following abstract submissions.
• Plan the conference closing session.
• Plan any social activities, typically the Monday Evening Event(s), sponsored or organized by the conference.
• Assist registrars and site coordinators with various portions of the conference, such as checking in attendees as they arrive at the conference, introducing keynote speakers, running the closing session of the conference, collecting and evaluating conference evaluations etc.
• Attend a conference call following each year’s conference to debrief and discuss lessons learned.
