I love the SGIM annual meeting. We share ideas and viewpoints, see old friends, and meet new ones. But it's only a few days each year.
What if we had a way to sustain that energy past the annual meeting?
I believe GIM Connect, our new member website, will help us do just that. But together, we need to invest in our online community, and right now is the time to do it.
How will we use it? An experience comes right to my mind from a past annual meeting.
I breathed in the familiar aroma of coffee, still waking up as I sat down at an early interest group breakfast. As we met and talked about great project possibilities, the energy turned on and the pupils dilated. We were all excited, rejuvenated by meeting colleagues with similar interests.
We rolled up our sleeves, and we set out to make future plans. As the educational technology interest group, we wanted to share what we love with the Society. We set a goal - to make a workshop for the next annual meeting.
Then the meeting ended, and we returned home to our other work at hand. Life resumed.
We pieced together a way to make the workshop a reality. Trying to "practice what we preach," we used social media to stay connected through the interceding months. We shared ideas through a blog and Twitter, and we used a wiki to put together the curriculum - across three states and two countries!
Fast forwarding a year later,
Ken Locke,
Neil Mehta,
Arash Mostaghimi and
I taught a pre-course called "Web 2.0 for the Clinician Educator." We had a great session, and we repeated it a year later.
Even though we were a group of techies, it doesn't take a web genius to use these tools! Thanks to the hard work of many SGIM members and staff including
Francine Jetton,
Julie Machulsky and others, we now have an online professional home that now offers all of us a place to network with one another and a home for committees and task forces to share working documents and foster discussions. Enter: GIM Connect.
When describing the value of our organization to prospective members, I say up front, "Your amazing fellow members are SGIM's best asset." As the name implies, our new site connects us to current and future friends in the organization. GIM Connect brings our membership and our collaborative work all in one place.
It can be tough adopting a new communication tool. Here are five quick tips to get started:
2. As you meet old and new friends, add them to your GIM Connect contacts. That one-on-one mentoring session? Don't let it be a one-time one-on-one mentoring session. Stay connected.
3. As interest groups meet and committees convene, carry on the discussions and share materials through the site. This also allows other interested SGIM'ers to see what you are doing.
4. Use the membership as a resource! The Open Forum allows members to ask one another for ideas and collaborators. We can also deliberate important issues of the day (Should SGIM advocate for gun control legislation? Should our officers be fully free of conflicts of interest?). Too much email? We can set preferences for how we want to receive messages (a daily digest, in real time, or not at all).
5. Download the smartphone/tablet app for your device. You'll be carrying around the SGIM Member Directory in your hand. Search "MemberCentric" in your app store, install, and select "SGIM."
Let's keep the discussions going, and keep our sleeves rolled up.