Feb 16, 2012 
I am happy to announce that I (davef) was named the 1st ever technical editor of the SMT Express, a weekly email newsletter that goes out to over 30,000 users in the electronics manufacturing industry. In addition, I will also become the 'ombudsman' of the electronics manufacturing forum located at http://www.smtnet.com/forums/ . This is not an official position at the company but is intended to facilitate communication between manufacturers and the thousands of electronics manufacturing professionals that use SMTnet on a daily basis.
SMTnet has asked me to become the voice/ombudsman for the SMTnet Forum community. They have done this in order to make the forum “all you want it to be.” That is, so that SMTnet can create an on-line resource for our community that will help us do our jobs better and keep our production lines running. In this, I want to help steer SMTnet towards providing things that are useful to practitioners.
To the above point, three improvements of SMTnet’s current plan would be:
- Encourage conversations that are aimed at highlighting and promoting developing trends in electronic manufacture.
- Expand, develop and renew topics of interest from past conversations about electronic manufacture.
- To a lesser degree, broach topics that have little or nothing to do with electronic manufacture, but may be of interest to you, the participants of the blog.
One of my goals, in addition to soliciting feedback and suggestions from all the forum participants, is to bring the latest information about solving everyday problems into closer contact with the providers. In this, one thing I’d like to do is to increase the number of equipment manufacturers and suppliers that are willing respond to posts on the forum in a non-proprietary fashion. We are blessed with a group of providers that understand how to respond to questions in a manner that provides information and at the same time steers away from making the response into an advertisement for their company. I’d like to see more suppliers participating in that fashion.
A second goal for this project: SMTnet wants you the users to have a place to contact me with topical suggestions, functional suggestions and anything else you might like to mention. Specifically, SMTnet would like users to help in the development of such functions. For instance:
- The ability to add pictures to forum posts was a great innovation. However, I’d like to see improvements. One such suggestion would be to see pictures limited to 640X480 JPEG. The 1600X1200 pictures posted on some threads are just so huge that they require using the scroll bar to view the entire picture. And when these larger pictures are posted, the text of the posting ends up getting stretched across the page, again requiring scrolling.
- Also, there may be room to improve some little used functions such as: SMTnet has what’s called a ‘‘Subscribe To A Thread.’ This forum alert allows those who have posted to a thread to receive an email notification when someone makes an additional post to that thread.
Last but not least, one of my far reaching goals is to form relationships with the manufacturers that are important in this industry. This will include getting ‘expert’ contacts at many companies to help provide insights into where things are with the technology of their products and services. This will also serve to ‘provide the right contact’ for things like ‘where can I find a manual for x’ or ‘I’m having a problem with manufacturer x’s equipment’.
I am here. I’m ready to listen. I’m open your suggestions.
Thank you for your participation.
Dave Fish
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