Dear Colleagues
Now that you have all settled down again after the summer break it is time for another newsletter.
The last time I wrote many of us were packing our bags for the 2001 conference in Berlin, which turned out to be the most successful EUNIS event yet with almost 500 delegates attending from 39 countries. The new EUNIS President, Professor Jan von Knop, wrote a review of the proceedings and a summary can be found on the web site. For those of you who may be new members, let me remind you of the URL: it is http://www.eunis.org
Let me also remind you briefly of the way in which EUNIS is organised. Formal membership is with the individual countries of Europe and each country can nominate two representatives. These country representatives together form the EUNIS governing body, called the General Assembly. But, as you can imagine, the GA is too large to meet regularly, so day-to-day management is vested in a Board of Directors, sometimes called the Executive Committee. As is usual, this consists of the President, who is Chairman of the Board, the Past President, the Secretary, the Treasurer and three 'ordinary' members. At the present, two senior members of the Board have been elected as Vice-Presidents and there is a Deputy Treasurer - all of these posts being filled to guarantee continuity of action.
Anyway, spurred on by the ongoing success of EUNIS, the new Board has already met. This was in June in Prague, and it was followed by a meeting between the President and the Secretary in July in Dusseldorf. EUNIS is a very democratic organisation and your Secretary, Ivan Vrana, has already posted both sets of minutes to the e-mail list. But minutes of meetings do not generally make fascinating reading - so I will remind you here of the main tasks that EUNIS members will be involved in.
Starting with the Chairman, Jan von Knop is responsible for the strategic management of EUNIS. He will deal with how best to market EUNIS and be first point of contact with EDUCAUSE, CRE and the European Community.
Jean-Francois Desnos has overall control of financial matters and will maintain contacts with the EU offices in Geneva and Brussels. He has also been elected as a Vice-President and will support Jan in the overall management of EUNIS.
Ivan Vrana, the Secretary, organises all those functions which help to keep EUNIS running smoothly. He now has some assistance in Prague to set up a comprehensive filing system and to deal with routine correspondence whether it be by letter, e-mail or telephone. He is also responsible for supervising arrangements for each annual conference and the EUNIS Elite Award.
Kristel Sarlin, from Helsinki and also a Vice-President, has responsibility for the Current Issues Questionnaire which originated with our colleagues in EDUCAUSE and which they are kindly letting us use across Europe. She has also accepted responsibility for promoting the EUNIS Academia. The Academia sets out to encourage the organisation of a series of workshops, which will be held in several European cities, and which will focus on some very specific topics.
The past President, Yves Epelboin, who stays on the Board, will be supporting the EUNIS web pages and developing the site as a portal to other relevant sources of information and member services.
Jens Doerup from Denmark, the deputy Treasurer, will be co-ordinating the work of the task forces and will, himself, be leading an initiative to develop distance and e-learning across our domain. He will also be introducing video-conferencing to the individual Board members so that they can hold electronic Board meetings.
And finally, Ligia Ribeiro has probably got the highest profile job on the Board. Her offer to host next year's conference in Porto was gratefully accepted by the GA in Berlin - all she has to do now is make it happen. As if that isn't enough she has also agreed to manage the task force which will be looking at those standards relating to information systems management which it would be beneficial to promote across our domain.
Two other members deserve a special mention. These are Andrew Rotheray and Leo Klasnic who will be helping in the areas of distance learning and international affairs respectively. Andrew and Leo both volunteered to be candidates for seats on the Board but were not selected because the GA voted to limit the size of the Board to seven members. However, the importance of volunteers was recognised and both colleagues were invited to work closely with current Board members.
Another important volunteer is Viljan Mahnic from Slovenia who has offered to set up the EUNIS publishing house. He is now Chairman of the Editorial Board and any proposals for publications under the EUNIS label should be sent to him.
The list of task forces so far, and who has volunteered to work in specific areas, was sent to the list in an e-mail from the secretary and dated 14 September. But this is already six weeks ago and things may already have moved on. However, EUNIS can only prosper if people volunteer their special skills for the general good. It seems that the Distance/E-learning Task force has had a sufficient number of volunteers so that it can begin its work under the leadership of Andrew Rotheray and Jens Doerup. The other task forces should start their work as soon as possible when they have had a few more willing volunteers. So, if you would like to join an existing task force, or if you have an idea for a new one, then please e-mail the secretary, Ivan Vrana (vrana@ pef.czu.cz) with your ideas.
This is a topic with which I was closely involved last year and in the run-up to the Berlin conference - so I want to tell you some of what went on in the background and how we want to develop the competition for the future. The first point is that by the time the deadline arrived we had six entries. We then had to choose judges, with the additional complication that we would have to ask them to mark the entries over the Christmas break. Four judges were chosen and a marking scheme devised. Each entry was marked against seven criteria with maximum marks being twenty-one - so, with four judges we could expect scores up to a maximum of eighty-four.
However, the winner was defined to be the entry which was judged to be best by more judges than any other entry - the actual scores would only be used to resolve conflicts. If this appears to be excessively complicated you have to remember that the US presidential election was taking place at about the same time and the American system was having great difficulty in declaring who had actually won.
Anyway, we collected the scores, applied the rules - and yes - we had a tie for first place! Much e-mailing followed - with many proposals as to how we might break the deadlock. However, the committee eventually decided that we had a tie for first place - and so be it! The joint winners were therefore declared to be the Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Porto. The authors from Finland were Kaisa Ala and Niclas Lindgren. From Portugal they were Gabriel David and Ligia Ribeiro. Both the winning entries can now be found at the EUNIS web site.
This situation caused some minor administrative difficulties at the Berlin conference where the timetable was already very busy. Eventually, however, the prizes were presented to the winners at the conference dinner in the splendid Museum of Natural History. GINIT Education AG, who sponsor the competition and provide the principal prize, were extremely generous and came up with another 2000 Euro for the winners. Our thanks are due to Ulrich Kammerer for this very generous gift. Our thanks also go to Ivan Vrana who, on behalf of EUNS CZ, provided two pieces of glass artwork as additional and permanent prizes for the winners.
The EUNIS President also gave an 'Honourable Mention' to the entry from the University of West Bohemia which came a very creditable third just behind the two joint winners.
You are now invited to prepare your entries for the next competition. The winner will be announced and the prize presented at the EUNIS 2002 conference in June at the University of Porto, Portugal. The rules are basically as they were last year with a few relatively minor changes. These are:
So - please consider the work you are now doing with your colleagues and think about whether it is suitable to be turned into an entry into the next competition. The EUNIS conferences have gone from strength to strength and we should very much like to see a similar increase in the number of entries submitted into the Elite competition.
Without judges we cannot run the competition. If you would like to volunteer as a judge then we would like to hear from you. Alternatively, if you know of someone on your campus who would be perfect as a judge, and may be too shy to put him/herself forward, then please let us know - but please ask them first. Please send your suggestions as soon as possible to Ivan Vrana as above.
When I started this newsletter I said that we were now settled down after the summer break. But it has taken longer than expected and I guess that some of us are now looking forward to the Christmas break. However, there is a lot happening in EUNIS as the moment and I confidently predict that there are things that I have forgotten to put into this newsletter. So - I expect that you will be hearing from me again soon.
Best wishes