CHRC offers new media steering committee as base for lobby voice

The Cultural Human Resources Council (CHRC) is offering what services it can to the new media industry to help the sector organize behind a single organization as it faces staffing, funding and other challenges moving forward. On the eve of the organization’s human resources forum set for Toronto in late November – a forum that will have a significant new media focus – executive director Susan Annis tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that the organization’s new media steering committee could form the nexus of a disinterested, national lobby group. The CHRC has a long history in new media dating back to 1997 when it began a series of studies of human resource challenges in the sector. Over the past year, it formed a steering committee to study training needs in multimedia with representatives from each of the provincial new media associations, as well as various media artists. The group is working closely with other organizations such as Women in Film and Television (WIFT), with which it is on the steering committee of WIFT’s ongoing statistical profile of women in screen-based media (CNM, March 6/03). While the partnership list, both formal and informal, of individuals and groups with which the CHRC has worked is impressive and has depth, the council has nonetheless slipped below the radar of many industry observers. The problem, Annis says, is that the CHRC has, until recently, focused on self-employed artists. The niche audience is atypical of other human resource councils, over 35 of which have been established by Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), the not-for-profit organization’s main funding source. Annis says, however, that the industrial side of the equation will become more of a focus for the CHRC moving forward, something HRDC envisioned when it first established the CHRC and other sector councils in the hopes they would bring employees, employers and training institutions together around the same table. For example, Annis notes, it’s likely the CHRC will have to look at things such as new media contracts as individual content creators go to work for larger companies. To date, the new media steering committee has focused its attention on a new media competencies study to be presented at the Strategy21: Cultural Human Resources for the 21st Century HR forum on November 21 and 22 in Toronto. The study will likely point to training as an area where work needs to be done and establishing quality control standards to deal with the many fly-by-night institutions that have popped up to teach multimedia. Project management is also likely to feature prominently in the soon-to-be released study as the steering group identified it as one area where current training curricula have fallen short. The November forum will also feature a room in which provincial new media associations will be able to promote their activities. Annis says the new media steering group’s activities won’t come to an end with publication of the competencies study. She says work will continue to conduct a survey of training needs from an employer’s perspective, a survey of new media freelance artists, and a survey of interactive games companies. The work will likely complement another of the CHRC’s initiatives to begin working more closely with employers in the film and television sector through an upcoming roundtable. As for creating a new organization that might speak for new media companies, Annis says that the CHRC harbours no designs to do so itself but believes the steering committee could form a natural nexus for discussions. She, like others in the new media industry, has noted past failures to create a national voice and says many attempts have been too Toronto-centric. She notes that the CHRC might be able to help. "The CHRC steering committee is more broadly-based," she says. "Our hope is that we’ll have a voice in new media that will come out at the end of this – a single voice for new media…If there can be enough weight here with these studies to give some profile and networking to this group, it’s a bit of a natural move. We just want to see it happen. We’re somewhat of a disinterested, neutral body."

CHRC offers new media steering committee as base for lobby voice

News | 10/10/2003 4:00 am EDT

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