Hello Autumn

A Message from the President

Good morning! And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight! 
 
The waning of summer and the onset of fall is a significant time in many families’ year. Ours is no different.  My wife, Ali, and I celebrate both of our birthdays, our anniversary, and more importantly the annual kickoff of the this-will-be-the-year-for-the-{insert team name here – Ducks, duh}’s-first-national-championship college football season. For myself, When September Ends marks the passage of time more poignantly than most other months in the year.   
 
For CSI, this is also a season marked by annual events. The Portland CSI Golf tournament in August marks the beginning and end of my golf season. Please join me in thanking Cherie McNabb for bringing home another successful fundraiser and golf tournament.  Cherise is in the thick of her twelve-class series preparing folks for the test to receive their CDT certificate. More importantly Cherise is preparing folks to understand and take account of how they and their community engage with the design and building process, as she has been doing for over 11 years! October holds CSI National’s annual conference, October 16th through the 18th. The CSI National Conference is another milestone for the passage of time, although on a scale more akin to years and decades. I find myself reflecting on the issues we’ve dealt with during past years’ conferences, and the issues we continue to deal with (someday the membership roster will make sense and be accurate, I’m sure of it Lee), as well as all the good people we get the opportunity to converse with, connect with, and celebrate with.
 
It's also my first season as President of the Portland Oregon Chapter of CSI. It is my 44th season as a member of Portland CSI, my 36th season as a Quality Manager at Walsh Construction, and my 11th season as a father. As I enter my 165th season on earth, I’ve decided to share my fascination with how we count, measure, and track things with our CSI community. One could argue, as I am about to, that the progress we witness is correlated strongly with the ability to count, measure and track things.  A nerdy example is this map, a 2-dimensional representation of our 3-dimensional planet. Through measurement of a variety of properties of maps, the authors argue it is a more accurate map than any other map drawn to this day.  A (perhaps too politically) poignant example is the counting of votes, be that the votes of the recently unenslaved in 1870, the votes of women in 1920, the votes of Floridians in 2000, or the votes for your Portland CSI board and officers in 2024. Tracking, whether it be data across our social media platforms or 300-mile wide storms barreling towards coastlines, provides information and feedback nearly instantaneously upon which life-and-death decisions are based. Each of these are examples of how counting, measuring, and tracking provide opportunities for progress (or regress). 
 
I enjoin our Portland CSI community to consider what we should be counting, measuring, or tracking in order to enhance the way we think about, design, and build our various projects. Whether those projects are housing for the homeless or educational sessions on the roles and responsibilities for each of us in our industry or just a to-do list to try and get “it” done. I look forward to hearing from each of you in the response section of our #csihardhat Blog (https://www.portlandcsi.org/csihardhatblog), where the President’s Thoughts will be shared in addition to here in The Predicator.

Cheers, 
Jake LaManna
Portland CSI Chapter President