As mentioned in the last column, in 1979 it was determined that our Society's income was increasing at an alarming rate. Therefore, to avoid undue attention by the Institute and by unfriendly revenue agencies at large, it would be prudent to consider ways to creatively spend the surplus for the benefit of the members. By the way, no one suggested reducing member dues, although, to be fair, income from dues has always represented a minor component of our total income.
President Toby Berger had appointed in the Spring the so-called ``Creative Spending Committee,'' headed by the Treasurer, to come up with suggestions. As I was the Treasurer at the time, I remain today uniquely qualified to report on the subject. The committee also included John Anderson and Neil Sloane. Its report was presented at the BOG meeting near the lovely village of Grignano in Northeastern Italy in conjunction with the ISIT on June 15, 1979. The recommendation was to target 15% of the annual budget to be spent for the following items. Before proceeding further, it is interesting to note that at the beginning of the meeting, before the presentation of the report, Fred Jelinek, then Past President of the Society, proposed that the lunch of the attending Board members and guests - it was a luncheon meeting - be covered by IT funds. His proposal was approved unanimously.
The first item suggested was the improvement and expansion of the Newsletter. The second suggestion was to start a series of Special Issues of the Transactions under appropriate Guest Editors on topics deemed to be of special interest to the members. The third suggestion was to organize special invited sessions on Information Theory subjects at conferences other than the ISIT. The fourth suggestion was to augment the number of Associate Editors and to specifically add Editors from outside the United States. The fifth suggestion was to provide free student subscriptions to deserving students. The sixth suggestion was to provide travel support to the President of the Society to attend the meetings of the IEEE Technical Activities Board. The seventh item was to establish an IT award for first-year (or early) graduate student work (such as M.S. thesis) and to support the winner's travel to the ISIT. The final suggestion was to fund the writing of tutorial papers on selected topics by acknowledged experts and to publish them with some regularity in the Transactions.
After the presentation of the report, considerable lively discussion ensued in the best tradition of the IT BOG meetings. This was perhaps stimulated somewhat more than usual by the strong expresso that capped the wonderful Italian repast.
Some of the highlights of the discussion included the recommendation
to establish long-term investment strategies for the Group's surplus
(i.e. to make more money!), the suggestion to hire an Editorial
Consultant to advise the Editor on publishing papers in
non-traditional areas, the establishment of a special annual IT
Transactions Issue on topics such as Cryptography, Compression,
Networks, etc., and numerous other interesting ideas that were
unleashed from the Board's collective imagination by the presentation of the
report. The most interesting suggestion come from Fred Jelinek who
proposed the establishment of 
another committee to sort out the
committee's recommendations!
In the end, as the allotted two-hour period for the meeting was coming to a close and the afternoon sessions were about to start, Dave Slepian moved that the Board approve all of the Committee's recommendations and that the President be given the power to determine ways of implementing them. The motion carried.
Later in the year, Toby Berger announced his decision to allocate $10K to the Transactions Editor to spend in support of any items that he deemed appropriate for the improvement of the Transactions.
Needless to say, the timid increases in spending (both the ones submitted by the Committee and the ones decided by the President) failed to reduce the Society's surplus. In fact, in the years that followed, the Society's reserves grew at a healthy rate and, as the turnover in Board membership changed the composition of the Board, the concerns about excessive wealth faded away.
However, old issues have a way of reincarnating in different forms. The desire to encourage students to participate in our Symposia prompted Bob McEliece, as General Chair of the 1985 ISIT in Brighton, to request from the Board a loan of $25K for the travel support of students and young researchers who lacked other means of support. For those unfamiliar with the complex financial procedures of the IEEE, every Symposium is supposed to run independently and have its own budget. It is expected to at least break even, although for many societies (including ours) the Symposia end up producing large surpluses. Of course the sponsoring Society assumes full responsibility for the Symposium and is expected to ultimately absorb the resulting surplus or loss. Thus the ``loan'' was simply a transfer from one ``pocket'' of the Society's coffers to another. To the surprise of everyone and contrary to previous results, the Brighton symposium ended with a loss and the loan was not repaid. The reason was the generous extension of support of participating students which was of course applauded by everyone.
As a result of this ``breakthrough'' in Symposium financing, it gradually became a tradition for all Symposia and workshops to request something between a ``loan'' and a ``grant'' from the Society to support travel to the meetings. Although this practice has failed to significantly reduce the Society's wealth, it has emerged as a new form of ``creative spending'' that was never foreseen by the 1979 ``Creative Spending Committee.''
Of late, this practice has started to dominate discussions at BOG meetings both on account of its
implications on
Society policy (i.e., does the Society routinely budget support for
travel to its technical meetings) and because of the heightened
sensitivity to the fragility of our financial position (i.e. the IEEE
General Fund needs and the changing publication markets seem to pose a
threat to the future of some of the IEEE Societies). This issue of travel support, which emerged as a wonderful
``creative spending'' idea, is now being discussed in a
changed environment in which, rather than creative spending, creative
savings is on the agenda.