ASSOCIATION NEWS
December 1998

Board of Governors Election

On December 15, 1998 the polls closed on the Association's first Board of Governors election (recall that the original Board was appointed as the organization was started from scratch. The new Board will serve for the next three years, beginning in January 1999. While the votes are still being tallied, it is interesting to note a few facts about this election. First, 462 of the 887 eligible members voted. Considering that the election was held during the Christmas holiday period this was an excellent turnout. The initial review of the ballots revealed two other interesting things --

(1) a number of very well qualified candidates for the Board were written-in. While this illustrated the strength of the pool of potential candidates, it was at the same time unfortunate because the Association staff had hoped that these very candidates would have been nominated during the 9-month nomination period leading up to the election. The logic in nom-inating a worthy candidate was to ensure that if elected they would serve (something that could not be done with the write-ins); and

(2) a number of very good ideas were surfaced for changing the organization Charter and/or By-Laws to improve the election process the next time around. Among the suggestions was to offer the membership a list of candidates in-stead of a slate (most votes win), to set an upper limit to the number of governors on the board as well as the current lower limit, to earmark some board positions to specific representation -- such as a reserve rep, four service reps, a junior officer rep, and a retiree rep, for example. These are great suggestions and we will act on them in the near future!

Results of the election were originally to be published in the December issue of the FAO Journal, but are still being counted and the results independently verified. The results will therefore appear on the FAOA Web Site in January and be published in the March issue of the Journal.

A Successful FAO Course Cocktail Party

Once again this year the Association sponsored a welcome cocktail party in honor of the new FAOs entering training through DLI/FLC. It was held in conjunction with the semi-annual FAO Course taught out at Monterey, CA., and had about 90 people in attendance. Guests included the Deputy Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy of the Army (BG Swannack), the DLI Commandant (COL Devlin), and former Ambassador Peck. The cocktail party is the first real recruiting opportunity that Association has with the new FAOs and pays a regular dividend in members to the organization.

What's Next With FAOA?

- College Scholarships.As noted last issue, our Charter requires that the Association return some of its income to the community in the form of College Scholarships to en-courage the study of regional or international relations within the United States. The College Scholarship Commit-tee is now working on establishing the requirements and criteria for our scholarship program. We will also make any changes necessary in our Charter and By-Laws to support the new program. Our initial thoughts are to support two annual scholarships of $1,000 each, to be awarded to a winning association member (or family member). We will also contact some of the defense contractors or inter-nationals to see if we can get them to sponsor these scholar-ships on a regular basis. Look for some-thing in the next issue of the Journal on this topic.

Seminars and Socials.The plans for a DC area FAO get-together may be coming out of mothballs. Options being considered are: a series of regional dinners, a mega-cocktail party with speaker, or both. More information to come once we actually form a committee from the new board.

!!!We Need Regional Editors
for the Journal!!!!

A great idea surfaced at the FAO Course. If we had a regional editor for each of the FAO Areas of Concentration, or a combination of them, the Journal could break new ground. An editor, say for Europe/Eurasia would scan the professional pubs from his/her region to identify worthy articles for the journal and for the web site. Many such professional publications have extremely limited distribution, but would be of interest to all of our membership. Once identified, we can get permission to reprint the articles in question. What we are looking for are ex-perienced FAOs who are voracious readers, probably internet users, and are willing to search the political and academic communities for a broad spectrum of professional pubs in their region.

Initially we are looking for a Europe/Eurasia editor, an Asia Editor, a Middle East/Africa Editor, and a Latin American editor. Once you volunteer, we can talk about benefits to doing this service to the Association. CALL US!!

1999, Foreign Area Officer Association
Springfield, Virginia
Maintained by LTC Steve Gotowicki.
http://www.faoa.org