Greetings CSINexters,
Welcome to the start of our new fiscal year, FY15!  Things are off to a great beginning for the only virtual chapter in the Institute. It’s going to be a terrific year and I am excited to be at the helm.  That said, I have a wonderful board of directors working with me.  This truely is a team effort and I am honored to be part of this group.

So, evidently this will be my last president's message. I know the second half of this fiscal year has been pretty quiet from my end... changing jobs does that sort of thing so my apologies. I would like to thank everyone who has made this such a productive year. We have had quite an active board and Daniel Hargreaves continues as the backbone of our chapter. We have had a very full year of chapter meetings and I think most everyone on the board has at least chipped in once to bring a program on board. Programs, evidently, are a very important asset of our chapter. According to a survey done by Institute, members value good webinars. People like quick meetings and meetings that are quick to get to. CSINext are the easiest meetings to get to since we are right at your desktop! By the way, we are always open to requests if you have a topic you would like to see at a chapter meeting, just let us know! Thank you to all of our great presenters who provided us with interesting chapter meetings. Thank you to PPG for funding our meeting software. Also a big thank you to all of YOU, our members, for supporting our chapter through your membership. Cindy, all the best to you for your year as President!

It's hard to believe that the holidays are already upon us, this year has just flow by. First of all, I would like to thank Jeff Holmes with Prosoco for presenting our November program, "Restoration Cleaning". Jeff did a great job on a very informative program. Where I live, historic preservation is a very important aspect of our city. It is amazing how a good cleaning can bring historic architecture back to life. 

Well tomorrow is Halloween. I hope all you kids out there (young and old) have a safe and fun time. Here in Poland we will be celebrating "All Saints Day" a Catholic holiday where you go to Mass and the family visits the graves of the family members that passed away. People decorate the graves with flowers and candles. At night there are so many candles burning in the cemeteries that you don't need a flashlight and you can unbutton that coat from the heat that the candles create.

In CSINext it's all treats and no tricks. I would like to thank Stephanie Bone for her great presentation on modular design. In November the program will be "Restoration Cleaning" and registration is currently open so feel free to sign up!

It's September! Back to school for all those kidos... For me September is Fall and it means 4 more weeks 'til winter... ugh. One thing that September has brought to our chapter... newly weds, congratulations Mr. Brent Williams! We wish you and your lovely bride all the best! Also I would like to send out a big thank you to Debra Powers of The Hager Companies for her great door hardware presentation last month.

Witam CSINext! No, that's not some strange misspelling or code word, it's just the fact that your new Chapter president lives in Krakow, Poland. I know there are some of you I know out there and some of you who I haven't yet met so just a little bit about myself as we start this new CSI year... I am CSI Proud! Why?... Well, I have been pretty much "raised" by this organization ever since I was told to join as a Freshman at the University of Tennessee by my professor (and good friend) Kathy Proctor. I am now in my 15th year of membership and what has that gotten me?... Contacts galore, leadership skills, jobs, knowledge, and respect as a professional. I simply would not be where I am today without CSI. Now all of that has not come to me by simply paying my membership dues, I had to get involved and the more I would sow the more I would reap.

As I sit here, reflecting back on the entire history of the virtual community that we know as CSINext, I’m amazed that we’ve come so far, so fast...for you see, this is the end of my second go-around as President of this Chapter. The first one was our first “official” year, even though I’d spent the previous 18 months running around in the background trying to pull everything together to make the concept of a “virtual Chapter” a reality.

The holidays are over and it is time for a changing of the guard… digital guard that is. At the November 17, 2009 Board Meeting, the Institute Board chartered the first virtual chapter. CSINext is the brain child of CSI Member Brent Williams. With social media storming through the internet like wild fire, CSINext is the next evolution of the CSI chapter. You may be familiar with Blogging, Facebook, and Twitter which is social networking. This is where CSINext comes in, taking the traditional chapter model to the digital world via social networking. Basically, allowing access to potential CSI members all over the world.

I need your help... How many times have we heard that? CSINext has floundered over the past year, mainly due to my health and spreading myself to thin. I have cleared off most of my plate, feeling good and I'm looking to work in the background again. I have mentally made the commitment to get CSINext back on track and make this next year the best it can be. I remember how CSINext started off strong and it filled the missing gap in CSI for the members. With that, we are looking bring up to speed in the next 30 days a new President and President-Elect. Here are our goals for 2012-13:

We’ve been hacked! Not just once, but twice. With that CSINext has moved its hosting and domain to goDaddy. For the moment, everything looks the same, but we will have a few more changes under the hood. The first thing you will notice is the speed improvement, being closer to the top of the chain and on faster servers makes a big difference. We have upgraded Joomla to the latest for improved security (and hope to prevent Hacks in the future).

We have been busy behind the scenes at CSINext. We had our chapter meeting with a good turn out last November and the meeting is just around the corner in February (tenative date is February 16th). The chapter is officially incorporated and in the final stages of setting up the bank account. We continue to have member growth with our current chapter membership at 22.We held our CSINext board meeting on December 21, 2010 and the next one is scheduled for February.

Just as you thought CSINext may have flat lined, it is still very much alive. We just had our November Chapter meeting and the next one is scheduled for January 19th. But I’m mainly writing this message to share a long journey that ends with “very good news”.

Lots of news to report. First, it's looking like the CSI board is going to approve our petition for charter, so we can finally get down to the business of community building with some legitimacy.

 Our October webinar, set for Wednesday, October 28th, at 2pm EST, has been postponed to November 18th because of technical issues. We apologize for the delay, but learning the particulars of a virtual environment are new and a lot more complex that you might imagine. We hope that you will join us on November the 18th at 2pm EST for an insight...

Yesterday I spent the day attending GlassBuild 2009 at the Georgia World Congress Center. GlassBuild is the largest trade assembly solely devoted to the glazing construction industry in the world. Lots of amazing products, vendors and speakers.The single biggest lesson learned from the show? Visual is IN! Greater than 80% of the vendors that were d...

Given the amount of discussion that I've heard lately, you'd think that the "virtual world" was as foreign to the A/E community as is the term "successful BIM integration". OK, so I"m guiding the lily a bit, but I've run into a lot of opposition to building a virtual chapter lately within the CSI community. It seems to me that there is a great amou...