1 Minutes of last meeting
The minutes of the IPA General Meeting of 18 August 2011 in Hong Kong as published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association vol. 41(3) were agreed on as being a correct record.
2 Matters arising
Most matters arising from the previous minutes were addressed in reports given later in this meeting.
3 President's introduction
Prof. Esling began by thanking the Executive and members of Council for their very active guidance and participation in IPA initiatives over the past four years. He reiterated the Association's status as the oldest and pre-eminent organization for phonetics in the world. He reviewed the significant accomplishments of the Association over the past four years: the IPA Council approved the incorporation of the IPA and the acquisition of a set of domain names for the IPA; the IPA established a new website including a Members’ Portal with privileged access for IPA members to the Journal of the IPA and JIPA back issues, JIPA illustrations, the JIPA Index, and to membership enrolment information; JIPA was published regularly, new online access protocols were established, and favourable access terms for IPA members were negotiated with Cambridge University Press; the IPA Examination was held regularly; the Association sponsored ICPhS 2015 (and played a role in sponsoring other phonetic meetings); and IPA scholarships for conference attendance as well as the Gösta Bruce Memorial Fund Scholarships were awarded to a record number of student members. The transition to online access to IPA services and to Cambridge Journals Online has occupied a good deal of the Executive's time and attention. The effort to rebuild and update the IPA website has been particularly gratifying. Prof. Esling emphasized the importance of these new practices and initiatives in attracting new members (which had been a priority of the previous President), especially student members, and providing them with enhanced services, and in maintaining administrative efficiency and protecting the financial operations of the Association.
4 Secretary's report
Secretary Patricia Keating reported on highlights of the Association's activities in 2011–2015: (1) As agreed at the 2011 meeting, in 2011 the new Council re-opened discussion of the proposal for a new (or redefined) vowel symbol for a central open vowel, and ultimately voted against the proposal. No other proposals about the alphabet have been brought to Council during this period. (2) The Association approved a grant and a loan to organizers of ICPhS 2015, in return for sponsorship recognition and registration fee reductions for members. The Association remains very keen on an overt sponsorship connection with the Congresses, and trusts that the Permanent Council will always facilitate this. The organizers of ICPhS 2015 are thanked for the high profile of the IPA at the Congress. (3) The Council also considered a suggestion from the 2011 meeting that the Association give financial support to other conferences, but voted against doing so. Instead, the Association will consider non-financial co-sponsorship of conferences, and has done so to a limited extent. The mechanism for proposing co-sponsorship and the practical consequences of co-sponsorship should both be revisited by the new Council. (4) Another suggestion from the 2011 meeting which the Council did adopt is student funding for conference participation. The IPA Student Awards were established in 2012, and so far 29 of these have been awarded, including 22 for this Congress. The Association also awarded 20 Gösta Bruce Scholarships for this Congress. A regular budget and better procedures for soliciting applications and granting awards are needed in 2015–2019. (5) Again following a suggestion from the 2011 meeting, the Association is now a co-sponsor of two International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Special Interest Groups: Speech Prosody and The History of the Speech Communication Sciences. (6) The Association's new website opened this year, at https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org. The site was set up and maintained by our webmaster, Kayoko Yanagisawa, with Michael Ashby. The webmaster's report from this meeting gives information about new features on the site, so the Secretary mentioned only that the full reports of the 2011–2015 officers are posted there, and that suggestions for additional kinds of content are welcome. (7) The new website includes links to our new Facebook and Twitter accounts. Many thanks to our Social Media Coordinator (or, informally, ‘Czar’), Joanna Przedlacka, who set up and maintains these accounts. At the time of this meeting, we had 342 Twitter followers and 794 Facebook ‘likes’, significant numbers when compared to the size of our membership. While to some extent these media are simply mirrors of News items on our website, we will be thinking about how to broaden their appeal and usefulness. (8) The Association continues to have foNETiks as its electronic newsletter, with about 2100 subscribers internationally. Many thanks to Linda Shockey, Gerry Docherty, Lisa Lim, and Rachel Smith for this service to the Association and to the larger community. (9) Some editing of Wikipedia entries directly concerned with the Association and our alphabet was undertaken by the Secretary and an ad-hoc committee (Andrew Butcher, Peter Roach, Bruce Hayes, Sameer Khan); most notably, our official 2005 chart has been posted in the entry on ‘International Phonetic Alphabet’. So that this could be done, the Council voted to make the chart available under the Creative Commons license required by Wikipedia; Małgorzata Deron provided versions in various formats and resolutions. (10) Voting by the full membership of the Association for the new Council and the new Permanent Council for ICPhS was conducted online for the first time, which almost doubled the participation rate compared to the 2010 paper balloting.
The complete Secretary's report has been posted on the Association's website (see https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/officers-reports).
5 Treasurer's report and webmaster's report
Treasurer Michael Ashby presented figures on income and expenditures for 2011–2014. During these years the Association has carried forward an increasing surplus, about £145,000 in total as of June 2015. Most of the Association's income is from Cambridge University Press's payments to us for individual and institutional subscriptions to JIPA; only about a quarter is from our members’ dues payments to us. The Treasurer made four recommendations for the future: (1) Set fees in pounds, not euros – having our income in euros but our expenses in pounds leaves us very vulnerable to currency fluctuations. (2) For 2016, make the default membership type online-only access to JIPA, with members wanting print JIPA paying a supplement. (3) Review our Life membership options. (4) Define, establish, and appropriately invest a reserve that would cover at least four years of normal operation for the Association, somewhere between £52,000 and £75,000.
A separate Treasurer's report is included in this issue, and the complete report has been posted on the Association's website (see link given above).
Webmaster Kayoko Yanagisawa reported that the new website launched on 1 January 2015, providing online membership management and access to online JIPA (including all back issues). Audio files from ‘Illustrations of the IPA’ and the new archive of papers from various International Congresses have been brought onto the site. As of July 2015, just over half of visitors to the website come from search engines, with the full IPA chart being the most popular page. She then presented information about membership in 2015: days when signups/renewals peaked; total membership increase from 376 in 2014 to 699 on 31 July 2015, with an especially large increase in student members; membership by country, with members from 58 countries though about half from the top three countries, UK, USA and Germany.
The complete Webmaster's report has been posted on the Association's website (see link given above).
6 Editor's report
Editor Adrian Simpson reported that the 2011–2015 period has been productive and efficient for JIPA, with its three issues/year (128–132 pages per issue) appearing as scheduled. JIPA publishes articles on phonetic theory and description. Since 2011, it has included 25 articles on segmental properties, 3 on general phonetic issues, 12 on prosodic aspects, 35 illustrations of the sounds of individual languages, 23 reviews of publications, IPA News items, and obituaries. Also since 2011, 90 regular articles and 64 Illustrations have been submitted for review. Of these, 14 regular papers and 24 Illustrations have been accepted, 43 regular papers and 2 Illustrations have been rejected, and the rest are in process. While about a quarter of submissions are from the USA, submissions have come from 39 other countries as well.
Audio files are now available from both CUP's JIPA website, and the IPA's own website. Online submission of manuscripts and online publication of articles in advance of print publication is planned for the coming year. We will be discussing making all Illustrations (text and audio) free to the public.
Like the Treasurer, the Editor reported on the income to the Association from JIPA: a net average annual income of £18,364. The journal's impact factor, while acceptable for a small niche publication (currently ranked 92/171 for Linguistics), has decreased since 2012, perhaps because at the same time Illustrations of the IPA began to be included as regular articles, which increases the divisor in calculating the impact factor.
Prof. Simpson thanked the authors, reviewers, Editorial Board members, outgoing editorial assistant Thomas Magnuson, and Ewa Jaworska, CUP's copy-editor, for their contributions to JIPA’s success, and welcomed incoming editor Amalia Arvaniti and new editorial assistant Angelos Lengeris.
A separate Editor's report is included in this issue, and the complete report has been posted on the Association's website (see link given above).
7 Examinations Secretary's report
Examinations Secretary Patricia Ashby reported that the number of Examination entrants has declined: only 37 entrants in 2012–2015. Of these, 22 were awarded Certificates and another 7 are entered for the September 2015 exam. Addressing points raised at the 2011 Hong Kong meeting, she reported that fees for the exam are gradually being raised, to reach £100 in 2016, that informal explorations have shown no real demand for examinations in languages other than English, that no further requests for examination centres outside London have been received, and that the attempt to run an exam at the Glasgow ICPhS failed for lack of candidates. On the positive side, the Certificate Examination webpage on the new website (https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/ipa-exam) is being expanded, with the additions of an archive of past exam papers, comments, and advice for self-study.
The complete Examinations Secretary's report has been posted on the Association's website (see link given above).
8 Election results
The results of the two rounds of voting (plus run-off rounds) to elect the Council of the Association and of a concurrent round of voting to choose representatives to the Permanent Council for the Organization of the International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences elected by the IPA membership were published in JIPA 45(1) and 45(2). The Secretary presented the list of the full Council for 2015–2019, along with the results of the last round of voting to elect the new Executive Committee of the Association, viz., Patricia A. Keating (President), Adrian P. Simpson (Vice-President), Gerard Docherty (Secretary), Michael G. Ashby (Treasurer) and Amalia Arvaniti (Editor). Outgoing members of the 2011–2015 Council were thanked: Andrew Butcher, Mária Gósy, Nina Grønnum, William Hardcastle, Michael MacMahon, John Laver (past President), John Ohala (past President), Linda Shockey, and Eric Zee.
9 Address by incoming President
Incoming President Patricia Keating thanked the Council for their trust and said that she is honored to be the Association's first woman president. Her focus in 2015–2019 will be the Association's educational mission. She hopes to offer more of the Association's existing materials freely to the public via the new website, and to develop new materials especially for this purpose. To be sure, as a result there will be less reason to join the IPA in order to access reserved members-only information, especially for members who have online institutional access to JIPA. Therefore the Association will need to provide other motivations for membership. While conference fee reductions and student awards will continue to be valuable to members and should be expanded, Prof. Keating suggested that we also join the IPA in order to help provide the world with the Association's expertise. She will be proposing standing committees for continuing tasks, and ad-hoc committees for special projects, to be headed by Council members but which other members could volunteer for. (An example would be collecting and posting real-language audio examples of each of our symbols and diacritics, perhaps by thousands of small contributions from members.) On this view, the IPA is an Association of current and future professional phoneticians who serve the much larger community of users of its alphabet, including not only non-phonetician professionals such as language teachers, but also serious hobbyist fans, some of whom are very active online, and undergraduate students. It is hoped that our new Facebook page – which already has more ‘likes’ than the Association has members – can provide a way to reach these wider audiences, and increase their awareness of current IPA practice.
10 Other business
Those attending the meeting were asked for their comments and suggestions on the above, or other, matters. Various topics were raised. It was suggested that the Association offer a version of its Certificate Exam by which members could show that they are qualified to teach general phonetics, setting a standard for the field. It was also suggested that the Association coordinate making the official IPA chart available in more languages. A member expressed approval of the in-progress public archive of past, present and future ICPhS papers; the Secretary commented that the varied copyright provisions for the past Congresses impose some restrictions on what can be included. Members volunteered to help with social media, IPA symbols in computer fonts, and compiling online audio examples.
Members were specifically asked how the Association might spend its income/surplus, and suggestions included paying for embedding of audio examples into the texts of Illustrations; investigate our current rights to Maître Phonétique and if necessary re-acquire them so that we can post its contents online; developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for IPA symbols so that electronic versions of articles could be fully searchable; and working to preserve historical phonetics laboratory equipment. It was also suggested that the Association convene a general forum for revising the Alphabet, on the model of the Kiel Convention, with special attention to the transcription needs of fieldworkers. President Esling responded that large-scale revisions to the IPA occurred in 1949 and in 1989, so it would be logical from the point of view of timing and of theoretical development to organize the next meeting to formally discuss revisions to the alphabet in 2029.
11 Closing
The President thanked the assembly and closed the meeting. The next IPA General Meeting will be held during the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in 2019. It will be chaired by the new President, Prof. Patricia Keating.
The meeting closed at 1:50 p.m.
