ARMA Solicits Chapter Speakers

ARMA has asked for potential speakers for chapter meetings to register in their master speaker database. I assume they also use it as potential gap-fillers for other ARMA events such as the annual and regional conferences. You can find the registration form at https://www.arma.org/general/custom.asp?page=SpeakerDatabase.

Updated schedule for AIIM training courses in 2018

Another in a series of irregular updates about my schedule and AIIM's overall schedule. Here's what we have coming up:

Nov 27-30, CIP Prep Workshop, London, UK
Nov 28-29, private class in Ottawa, ON
Dec 4-7, Modern Records Management Master Class, Silver Spring, MD
Dec 11-14, Modern Records Management Master Class, London, UK
Dec 18-21, private class in Orlando, FL

Courses in the U.S. are taught by me, Jesse Wilkins, CIP, Director of Certification at AIIM. Courses in the UK are taught by Alex Visser, CIP, a long-time AIIM trainer accredited to teach every course AIIM offers.

All courses include interaction with the instructor, the course materials, and access to online course materials for six months. The Modern Records Management Master Classes include access to the online exam.

The CIP Prep Workshops include an exam voucher good for 1 year that can be used to take the exam at any Kryterion testing center world-wide or through Kryterion's online proctored exam (OLP) process. The Denver CIP Prep workshop will include an onsite proctored exam for those students prepared to take it.

All of these courses are also available as self-paced online courses. Self-paced online courses have a lower price, and don't require travel, but require more self-motivation to complete in a timely fashion.

We'll be posting the 2019 course schedule soon.

For more information on any of these courses, or to schedule a private course for your organization, please contact me directly at jwilkins@aiim.org.

NYT editorial on blockchain and online voting

Written by Alex Tapscott of the Blockchain Research Institute, it's a great article and argument as far as it goes. But it glosses over a number of key issues/assumptions:

• That all enfranchised voters can get, and remember how to use, a digital ID
• That there would be a ready way to move this ID between devices - how many of YOU are using the same phone you used in 2016? 2014? 1988 (my first election)? 
• That all enfranchised voters have access to such a device in the first place - yes, smart phones are nearly ubiquitous, but that's not the same as 100% access. 
• That the problem of multiple users/device can be solved - think public libraries, retirement homes, homeless shelters, etc.
• Most importantly, the author rightly notes that "There is no shortage of politicians in power who benefit from the inaccessibility, insecurity, or lack of public faith in the electoral process. They have every reason to cast doubt upon, or outright oppose, an improvement in the way elections are run." This is an issue on all sides of the political arena. 

The article is definitely worth a read: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/online-blockchain-voting.html