I’m not sure why I haven’t mentioned this before, but in the last few months I’ve been fortunate to be part of a small group of people who decided to create a professional association of industrial/organizational psychologists working or studying in the San Diego Area. Starting an organization like this was both weird and banal at the same time. The idea had actually been bouncing around between myself and a few people at work for over a year, and we eventually worked up to just picking a date, calling a meeting, and contacting everyone we knew. The response was pretty astounding –over 100 I/O students and professionals showed up. We chatted a bit about what we should do and then chatted about how often we should meet, and then –presto!- We had ourselves a professional organization.
The only thing we really had to argue about was the title, which turned out to be “San Diego Industrial/Organizational Professionals” or “SDIOP” for short. There was some rancor over the “P” standing for “Professionals” or “Psychologists” as the vast majority of us (maybe even all of us) were not technically licensed to call ourselves psychologists. Having had all interest in the name game ground out of me in the course of naming products at GameSpy, I didn’t care as long as we didn’t come up with anything that abbreviated as “NAMBLA.”
Over the course of the next few weeks we organized our first meeting and I got myself elected as an officer. Not president, though –that went to the very capable Ben Schneider, who is about as an experienced and noteworthy a guy as we could have hoped for to be in charge of the thing. I ended up as Secretary/Webmaster, which worked out pretty well as one of the first things I did was bang out our website:
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Kind of fruity, I know, but I like it. It was fun to design a website for once that wasn’t a blog. I actually would have linked to it earlier here but it was kind of …fundamentally broken in one spot and I didn’t figure out how to fix it until yesterday. Sorry. Nobody complained in the meantime, though, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
At any rate, if you’re an industrial/organizational psychology professional or student in the San Diego area, we’re meeting again in August. The specific place and date are still being worked out, but should be posted on the website if anybody can get that lazy webmaster to do any work.
Nice! I just started on a design for my mother-in-law’s realestate firm ESM Realty Services, Inc.
Agree completely that it’s fun to do something other than journal-style websites. I have a few known problems, one of which is that the tabs are busted (well, look ugly anyway) in Firefox. Still functional, at least.
Need to do lots of prettying up, but the major content is there.
Hey Todd, you link doesn’t seem to work.
One other thing to note about the SDIOP design is that it’s ALL CSS, baby. I think there’s one table, but it’s actually used to present tabular data instead of being used for site design/layout. Go figure. There also aren’t any image tags. All the images are handled through CSS and divs. The whole thing really makes me want to recode this site, but I know what a mess THAT would be.
Wierd! It worked in the preview!
http://www.esmrealtyservices.com/ is the URL if you want to copy/paste.
Jamie, Just viewed your new website for SDIOP. Interesting! Nice, but I was unable to pull up the application form. Maybe it is just my computer, and it doesn’t matter much as you know I am not joining. Good luck.
Just a probably unwanted suggestion. If your meeting is every other month and on a Thursday, it is best to pick a certain Thursday and keep it constant, like the third Thursday etc. I know I always mark my date calendar for such events at the beginning of each month.
Hope you have good membership and attendance at your next meeting.
PS – Like the palm trees