I thought of narrating the history of digital SLEN to our membership.

Sri Lanka Engineers News ( SLEN ) went "fully digital" in August 2013, setting new standards in quality, original content, formats, and delivery in a publication even among regular public stream media publications! Certainly we can be very proud that IESL SLEN has no equal among news publications of professional bodies in Sri Lanka.

As a first step towards the digitizing SLEN , paper SLEN was converted to a Adobe PDF document and uploaded to the IESL website for easy viewing of the membership. However, the content, frequency, or the way content was obtained did not change. The limited copies of the paper version was sent to those who requested via post. At the time of the decision to curtail the paper copies a survey was conducted among the full membership via post and email to find those who "preferred to continue receiving paper version". As of this report we find the number of copies printed to be still high and plans are on the way to " print as a need arise" using a high quality internal printer donated by the NSW Chapter ( Australia). Currently printing is outsourced while the content and the PDF version is developed in house. The printing cost is now a fraction of what it used to be.

However, to improve the most important aspect of the news letter, content/ format/quality/timeliness etc and make its readability much more attractive, IESL first provided a Blog on its website for the members to post articles to SLEN thus giving a very visible mechanism for any budding author from "anywhere in the world in any language". Articles selected from the blog went into SLEN.

But the real digital revolution came to SLEN when the IESL implemented its new Membership Management Software in July 2013. SLEN went fully digital with multimedia ( voice, video, etc.) and much more rich articles from the members and the World Wide Web. It's published twice a month ( more than doubling the frequency in reality) and delivered to those who are properly registered with the new membership management system ( part of the exclusive benefits of becoming a member of the IESL). If a member is a valid member and has a valid email address in the system, such members receive a very high quality, feature rich, one of a kind news letter, that has set a new standard among the Sri Lankan professional organizations! The implementation of the new membership management system is providing very accurate numbers of our membership and at the time of this writing, more than 8000-9000 members are receiving the Digital SLEN. Our current membership stands at 12,822 (Oct 1, 2013) and as the members renew their contact information, the reach will be more. The Digital SLEN is archived ( along with the traditional paper SLEN in PDF format ) and made available via the IESL website.

We have established a proper team that includes an experienced digital content developer, a trainee, and the IESL's own publicity department. We have purchased a state of the art video camera and world class computer equipment (Apple iMac) that is the staple of a good publishing organization. Equipment were purchased through a donation from the NSW Chapter in Australia. We will have all these technical capabilities in October 2013. With these equipment we are in a better position to not only enhance our Digital SLEN but also upgrade our regular news streams via our own website and other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. We are doing it already. Our articles are unique and of very high quality and are developed by our teams' ( IESL publicity department, members in Sri Lanka as well as in the diaspora) visits to various sites in Sri Lanka as well as abroad.

We always believe that IESL has to do something new, that's how the membership will always be with us. If you have novel ideas please write to us. Door is always open for good ideas.

UdeniNawagamuwa (nawagamuwa@gmail.com)
Editor