by Kevin Miller

I have been the Chair of the Information & Communication Committee for the past 10 years. Committee members in 2007 were Anita Miller and Jaclyn Pauls.

Triathlon Manitoba uses e-mail, our website (almost 100,000 hits in the past year), the telephone, our Spring Newsletter, E-mail Contact List messages (15 in the past year), media releases (also 15 in the past year), and paper leaflets to communicate information to our membership and others.

Three miscellaneous comments:

• Last year I mentioned that, although I believe our members' results at important out-of-province races should be showcased on our website, it was getting to be a pain to keep track of all those out-of-province race dates, and then to actually locate the results, so I asked participants to give Anita a Heads Up about some of those races. In 2007, Anita was contacted by a few people, but sometimes she had to search for the results herself..
  
• Anita wrote all but one or two of the Headline Photo Story items in 2007. She received a few ideas from Jaclyn and I, but most of the ideas were hers. For the most part, fewer of the stories have been about showcasing a member (because they are more difficult to write), and more of them have been promotion of upcoming events or highlighting a particular achievement. Anybody with an idea for a story should contact Anita. 
  
• Our website is based on 11-year-old technology, but it still works well, and it's the content of a website that is really the important thing. It was developed using Microsoft Front Page. Anita is extremely productive using Front Page to update the website,  However, there are many new web development software products that produce technologically current websites, and have "content management" features that enable any authorized computer-literate person to make updates to the website. If a volunteer stepped forward who was willing to redevelop our website with one of these new software products, could produce a plan that would successfully migrate our current ~700 pages (~1400 files) from the current website to the new website, and set up procedures for ongoing maintenance, it might be worth pursuing. I think this would take somebody many dozens of hours of effort.