Most KMEA activity occurs between September and February. This is often referred to as "KMEA Season." There is a lot of work involved in the business of KMEA, and often the "seasonal" duties just seem to happen. But what about March through August? A strong off-season is critical to having a successful season. And that's where we find ourselves as the end of another school year approaches.

On March 15 each year, we open up the Clinic Proposal form for the next ISW. I encourage anyone who is considering presenting to fill out a proposal prior to October 1. A word of caution to those filling out the form: I do not recommend copy/pasting your proposal into the form. Every year we have someone try to paste content from a Word document into the web form. Our web form not only does not accept text formatting, there are also character limits on the Title and Description boxes. The Clinic Description must be a single paragraph with no line returns. If you put a line return in there, our system automatically takes it out when you click on Submit. There have been many instances in the past several years of someone pasting too much content into these boxes only to have it clipped off by our system, and they did not realize it. The entry boxes have character count-downs (just like Twitter) that help you with length. The Titles and Descriptions from the Clinic Proposal entries are then used not only at the ISW Planning Session in October, but also in the ISW Program Schedule and online Schedule. You probably have a fantastic clinic idea. That's great! Focus your writing on the main points you want to hit and you will have written a great clinic description.

Another form that is opened on March 15 each year is the Performance Group Application. In 2011 this part of the KMEA website was re-built due to the creation of a new database on the web server that keeps track of auditions and performances. Upon completing the audition application, directors are given a "Passkey" that is unique to that application. That, combined with a PIN selected by the director, allow the director to login to the Performance Group Manager to make edits to the application prior to mailing the audition package to the President-Elect. Directors, once you have mailed your audition package, go into the Performance Group Manager and mark your audition as "Sent." The KMEA President-Elect will likewise mark when it arrives. This is our version of UPS Tracking.

Shortly after the list of groups selected to perform at the upcoming ISW is made public, those directors are able to access the Repertoire Report inside the Performance Group Manager. You may add performance selections, edit selections, mark the order of performance, as well as determine the approximate duration of the music selections so as not to exceed your time limit on stage. Our goal is to take the data from the Repertoire Reports and convert that into a repository for future uses, such as research.

Underway now in our behind-the-scenes work is the development of a new project called "KMEA Rolodex." The Rolodex will be a database of music teachers in Kansas, using information entered by teachers. This database will eventually become the core of the KMEA website, serving as the starting point for many of our registration forms, such as district and state-level honor ensembles. The Rolodex will also help us keep track of various teacher groups enabling KMEA officers to send out email notices to the teachers in their areas of responsibility (ie, elementary music teachers in the South Central District). Eventually the Rolodex could also allow us to gather survey data. We would like to use it for online elections. However, we are still waiting on NAfME to make some much-needed improvements to their membership database, including API access for MEAs, which would allow the Rolodex to interact with NAfME membership data in real-time. We have requested this from NAfME but have not yet received any indication if or when it will happen. As you can probably tell, the Rolodex, and everything it would be able to do, is no small project.

Clearly much is happening behind the scenes with KMEA web technology. So much that I'm having a hard time figuring out this "off-season" thing! In closing, ISW 2013 will never be forgotten, as far as I'm concerned, thanks to Mother Nature's bad timing. I know my stress level was nothing compared to that of my friend Craig Manteuffel. Those were a crazy few days. I tip my hat to everyone who made it, as well as everyone who made it happen. In a word, you brought "awesomeness" to ISW. Bravo!