Editor's Note

This is our last Newsletter under the owa-usa.org website.

I am very glad to have had an opportunity to keep our newsletter going for the last five years. It was a privilege to share our thoughts, our activities and more importantly sharing the changes of our organization.

I have been fortunate to work on our newsletters from the beginning and intermittently for the last fifty years. I believe a newsletter not only informs members of activities and of sharing of experiences and ideas, but also as a place to record the history of the organization. I remember constructing our first newsletter in 1973, cut-and-paste on a single sheet of paper with photos, xeroxed, then folded to be mailed without an envelope to the few women architects we knew and to all architectural offices in the Bay Area. In order to make our newsletter stands out from other advertisements, we always printed it on colored paper, preferably canary yellow.

In 2002 Bill Hocker, who had experience in creating his own sites, developed the first OWA web site and incorporated a page for each new newsletter.

In 2005 the OWA hired a website designer to manage the site and create a database to keep track of membership and dues. While the new member registration form and dues database worked quite well, the effort to tweak it, add new pages and add new features involved costly consulting fees. It soon proved to be unsustainable for such a small organization.

By 2006, Bill had already been working on his own database-linked websites and again took over the OWA site, creating a database-backed newsletter, forum, portfolio generator, email generator, calendar, survey form and eventually a generic page generator that allowed any administrator to create new pages for the site. The intent was always to allow Administrators and Steering Committee members to modify and update the site and carry out the digital functions needed. And the intent was also that the website be a continually added-to archive of the history of the organization while also serving as an event organizer and a showcase for the work of its members in the present. For the last two decades it has worked out fairly well. But the demand for ever more functionality and gadgets, now available with commercial web developer packages, has made it difficult to keep up. It is, perhaps, time to move on.

A new web site is to be launched in May 1 2024 by Steering Committee member Loretta Drummond.