Instructions for the Monthly EC Report | |||||||||||||
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There seems to be some confusion about the numbers part of the monthly EC report. The numbers really are important. When they are totaled at Newington every month they become evidence that the Amateur radio service is indeed performing it's mandate to operate in the "public interest, convenience or necessity" and does so in terms that even the most penurious bean counter can understand, head count, number of incidents and man-hours. This evidence goes a long ways when used to defend our frequencies in the FCC and Congress. Conversly, if we don't make these reports, then there is no evidence that we are taking our public service responsibilities seriously, something that other entities that covet our spectrum can and do use to our disadvantage.
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Personally, I find the form itself a bit confusing. Based on the EC reports I see, you folks do too. The purpose of this note is to spell out what each field means. A quick look at the ARRL website provided a look at the pre-computer version of the form (PDF and WORD formats) but showed no description of what information was really being requested. Hopefully the following descriptions, based on our on-line version of the formwill get us all on the same page.
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What I hope will become clear is that you need to know how many distinct nets you have, how many times a month each of these nets meet, how many people checked in to each net session and how long each net session lasted. This is the information that needs to be boiled down for entry into your monthly EC report. The descriptions below sound more than a little like a tax return (remember the penurious bean counter?) but are really a few simple and straight forward items applied again and again and again. The example is a bit contrived, so while I'd really LOVE to see you folks reporting this many activities, I expect that most reports will be simpler.
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The form fields and their descriptions follow.
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1. County: Since EC's in Nevada are appointed one to a county (mostly), this should be your county. There is a pull-down list from which to select your county.
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2. Month: The is the month to which the report applies. For example, the report that is due on June 1 will cover the month of May. Again, there is a pull-down list for you to select the month.
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3. Year: This is the year. It should be current. If it's not, use the pull-down to select the correct year.
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4. Total ARES members: This is obviously the number of members on your current ARES roster.
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5. Changes since last month: This is obviously the change in item 4 since last month. Apparently it's not obvious that "1" is the same as "+1" and different from "-1".
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6. Number of active nets: The previous items are all pretty obvious - the descriptions above are mostly unnecessary. Not so with this item. This is the number of distinct nets in your county, not the number of times the net met. For example, if your only net is a county ARES/RACES net that meets once a week, this number should be one. If you also have another regular net, it will only add one to this number even if meets twice a day. For example, if you have a county ARES/RACES net that meets on Tuesdays and an NTS net that meets every day, this number will be 2.
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7. Total Sessions: Given the description of item #6, this one should be clear. Considering the above example, in May 2007 you would have had 5 ARES/RACES net sessions (every Tuesday) and 31 NTS net sessions (every day) for a total of 36.
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9A. Number of nets, drills, tests & training sessions: This is the number from item 7 above to which you add any additional training activities. Continuing the same example, if in addition to your ARES/RACES and NTS nets you also ran your phone tree once (a drill), sent four NTS messages around the county to see how much time it required to be delivered (a test) and held a weekend ICS-100 class for your members, this number will be 36 (from item 7) + 1 (phone tree drill) + 4 (NTS test) + 1 (ICS-100 class) for a total of 42.
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9B. Number of volunteer hours: This is where you need to know how many people participated in each incident counted in item 9A and how much time each incident took. Continuing the same example:
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10A. Number of public service incidents this month: These are things that were done as pure public service. Parade or bike ride communications are common examples. These are different incidents than those in item 9A above. Continueing the example, perhaps your team provided communications for a bike ride. This number would then be 1 (a bike ride).
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10B. Number of volunteer hours: Continueing the example, perhaps 8 people from your team provided communications for a bike ride that lasted 8 hours. This number will then be 1 (bike ride) x 8 (volunteers) x 8 (hours) or 64 volunteer hours.
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11A. Number of emergency operations this month: Again, these incidents are different from the kinds of incident counted in 9A and 10A. Emergency operations are incidents where peoples lives or property were endangered. Some of these will include wild fires, floods, tornados, hurricanes and communications outages. Continueing the example, perhaps your group provided communications to the local hospital while there phone system was out of service for upgrading and then again two days later when the upgraded telephone system failed. In this case, you would report 2 incidents.
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11B. Number of volunteer hours: Like items 9B and 10B, this is the number of volunteer hours spent this month. Continuing the example, the phone system upgrade it took perhaps 1 hour to complete and used 8 Hams, for a total of 8 volunteer hours. The phone system failure two days later took 4 hours and 16 people, for a total of 64 volunteer hours. The number reported in this field is the total, 72 hours.
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12A. Total number of ARES/RACES events this month: After the complications above, this one is simple. It's just the sum of items 9A, 10A and 11A above. In the continuing example, this will be 42 + 1 + 2 or 45.
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12B. Total volunteer hours: Again, this one is simple. It's just the sum of items 9B, 10B and 11B above. In the continuing example, this will be 108.7 + 64 + 72 or 244.7 volunteer hours.
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13. Comments: The above sections are just (important) numbers that are reported up the "food chain". This section is where you describe in (hopefully lucid English) what happened. There are two main guidelines for this section. The first is to observe the KISS principle. Keep the descriptions as simple as you can without omitting any important detail. The second is to give credit by full name and call to the people who participated.
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Hopefully the following description of where your "comments" go will be of value to you when writing this section.Your DEC will take the numbers and comments from all of the EC reports and incorporate them into the DEC report. The DEC will add up all the numbers, add any district wide additional numbers (i.e. the Noon net and the Tuesday night ARES/RACES district net), copy all of the EC comments, add a few comments of their own and ship the whole package to our Section Energency Coordinator. The SEC then takes the DEC reports (numbers & text), adds his own comments & numbers (section HF & IRLP net numbers) and sends it to both Newington and our Section Manager.
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The subject of editing of the comments text has come up a few times. For the most part, DECs may occasionally make small edits for spelling and grammar before sending it to the SEC. the SEC usually doesn't do much editing, he just copies the comments verbatim into his SEC report. If the SEC really has an issue with something in an EC report, he will contact the appropriate EC directly.
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Another issue that has come up is how long the comments section can be. There isn't much of a limit here, you can make your comments as long as they need to be. I've never hit the limit on this and am not sure there is one. If you do happen to hit the limit, let me know and I'll either increase it or take your report directly, where the limit is "how big an e-mail can you send?"
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That's the end of the format ARES reporting trail. Here in Nevada, there is still more after that. After the SM gets the SEC report, he sends it to the section webmaster (that's me) to be put on the Nevada section web page (http://nv.arrl.org) for all to see. I add some HTML formatting and usually need to do a few small edits for spelling and grammar. Again, really no size limits here. What you write is what you should see on the website.
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But wait, there's more! Once the SEC report is added to the section web site, I take a snapshot of the section news for the month and boil it down for the section news summary, which is e-mailed to all ARRL members in the section who have asked for it and is also included as part of the QST CDROM for the year. Here is the only place where there is a size limit. In addition to the SEC report, there are also stories from the section website over the previous month. Usually there is twice as much news as there is room for in the summary, so I have to do some fairly drastic editing.
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For what it's worth, I stop editing as soon as the news summary is small enough. Also, makeing cuts to the EC reports the very last thing I consider. Here is my list of "the usual suspects". Knowing what I am likely to cut (if I have to) should help you write stuff more likely to survive the editing process. Note that anyone who wants the "unedited story" can look at the section web site.
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The first cut is any web stories that do not directly mention a Nevada club or a Nevada Ham. The SEC report is exempt from this, so your EC reports are also exempt.
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The second cut is to remove any URLs, particularly if they are long. These are available in the unedited version on the web.
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The third cut is items that are redundant. For example, the SEC report may wax eloquent on the subject of EMCOMMWEST while there is also an article about EMCOMMWEST. In this case, I'll use my own judgement as to which item has more information and then copy over unique stuff from the other item before I delete it. This one applies to the SEC report as well. If the SEC mentions something in his comments that is also mentioned in DEC or EC comments, something may be removed. If the information is the same, I'll usually remove the SEC version and leave the EC version intact, mostly.
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Sometimes, this is enough. Sometimes it's not. The fourth cut is to rephrase and condense any text in the summary. Rephrasing "buys" a reduction that is usually between one word and one line of text. Particularly verbose descriptions (something I often indulge in myself) have an increased likelihood of being revised.
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At this point, the rest of the summary is fairly Spartan and the SEC report becomes the main target. The fifth cut is to delete anything in the SEC report (including DECs and ECs) that does not directly mention a Nevada club or a Nevada Ham.
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These five edits have so far been enough to get the size below the limit. I expect that should I need to make further edits, the sixth edit will be to choose a web article to cut based on it's size and my estimate of its relevance.
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73 de Glenn Thomas WB6W webmaster/NV former EC/DEC | |||||||||||||