Important Message Requiring Your Vote

Rabab Ward
President, IEEE Signal Processing Society

At its November 2015 meeting, the IEEE Board of Directors approved the presentation to IEEE membership of proposed revisions to the IEEE Constitution. They are to be voted upon by the IEEE membership as part of the 2016 IEEE election ballot, opening 15 August and closing 3 October . The revisions have the stated objective: "Create a nimble, flexible, forward-looking organization."

During its 25 March 2016 meeting, the Signal Processing Society's Board of Governors (BoG) carefully reviewed and considered the proposed IEEE Constitutional Amendment change, and unanimously passed this motion: The BoG of the SPS is not in favor of the proposed constitutional amendment and optimized board structure.

BoG reasoning included the following:

1. The problem statement that the proposed amendment is attempting to solve is not well-defined;
2. The existing IEEE Constitution offers alternative, less complex ways of accomplishing the intended improvements;
3. There are considerable unknowns associated with still-to-be-written bylaws under the proposed constitution; and
4. The risk associated with a major constitutional change is not clearly outweighed by its possible benefits.

The SPS BoG wants Society members to be fully informed voters, so this motion was also unanimously passed: It was moved for the Society to create and communicate a balanced view of the pros and cons of the constitutional amendment to the membership of the Society.

We encourage you to read about the proposed changes, make up your own mind about them, and dutifully exercise your right to vote to influence IEEE's future.

The proposed changes to the Constitution can be found here:
https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/election/2016_constitutional_amendment.html

You can learn more about the IEEEin2030 effort to evolve the IEEE organizational structure here:
https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/ieeein2030_archive_m.html

Some statements of opposition to the proposed constitutional amendment are here:
https://ieee2016blog.wordpress.com

Some webinars on the subject can be found here:
http://taops.ieee.org/tabin2030

The above page is open to any IEEE member and you need to use your IEEE account to access the materials. If you are not automatically redirected to the TABin2030 page once you log in, try to copy/paste the URL into the address bar.

For background, the IEEE governing documents, including the Constitution and Bylaws, can be found here:
http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/index.html

Whatever you decide, it is important for you to vote to get your voice heard.