Dear Colleagues
This newsletter comes to you as the conference organisers in Portugal are preparing for what everyone is confident will be another first class event. Most of you by now will have seen a preliminary programme and probably made your plans to attend. If you haven't yet seen the programme and are undecided about going to Porto then look at the conference web site at - http://www.fe.up.pt/eunis2002. I am sure that it will be very successful and most enjoyable. The Berlin conference was very successful but perhaps the sunshine of Portugal in June will add just a bit of extra enjoyment.
One part of the conference in which I play a very small part is the EUNIS Elite competition. In the last newsletter I encouraged you to prepare your entries and send them off the Ivan Vrana in Prague. A number of entries were subsequently received and these have now been passed out to the volunteer judges for the scoring process. I shall be on holiday for the next two weeks but when I get back I expect all the judges to have done their work and their individual scores to be in my mailbox ready for adding up. Thank you to all who entered and I wish you the very best of luck.
Most of you will be aware of some changes in the responsibilities of members of the EUNIS Board. Kristel Sarlin has taken over as the Chairperson while Ribeiro Ligia and Andrew Rothery are both nominated as Vice-Presidents. Viljan Mahnic has also been co-opted onto the Board. The appointments of Viljan and Andrew Rothery, who were both volunteers in Berlin, will have to be approved by the General Assembly meeting in Porto.
Earlier in the year, a Strategic Workshop was held in London for members of the Board. The main purpose was to review and revise, if necessary, the current EUNIS mission and to ensure that EUNIS is organised in such a way that the mission is achievable. This meant assessing the current strengths and weaknesses together with the opportunities and threats (a SWOT analysis!) and discussing how the finances could be improved and the organisation strengthened.
The meeting was 'facilitated' by Michael Zastrocky of the Gartner Group and Martin Price of UCISA. Both Mike and Martin have been regular attendees at EUNIS conferences and will be well known to many of you. Michael Zastrocky, who is Vice President Education, Gartner Group, is an Honorary Member of Eunis. This reflects the help he has been over the years as EUNIS has struggled to get established. He has a great deal of experience with academic associations and was elected as Vice President of CAUSE in 1989. Martin Price is Executive Secretary of UCISA which, as most of you will know, is the body which brings together senior people in UK academia and which is formally the member of EUNIS.
EUNIS was formed in Europe in 1993. The equivalent US organisation is EDUCAUSE and the comparison between the two is interesting and informative. EDUCAUSE was formed in 1998 by the merger of CAUSE and Educom, both of which were initially formed in the 1960s. CAUSE originally brought together staff in universities and colleges who were beginning to use computers for administrative purposes whereas Educom was the group for those interested in developing the networking capabilities of computers. Mike Zastrocky has a wealth of experience with bodies such as these and served as Vice President of CAUSE from September 1989.
EDUCAUSE is a non-profit association and has a membership of about 1,800 colleges, universities and other educational organisations. Most of these are in the USA but there are a significant number across the world. Looking at the web site I even discovered that my home university, Manchester, is a member! Membership fees vary according to institute size and go from about 400 US dollars for a small college to over 6000 dollars for a major research university. To administer all this, EDUCAUSE has more than 50 permanent staff in two offices; one in Boulder, Colorado and the other in Washington, D.C. EDUCAUSE conferences regularly attract several thousand delegates.
EDUCAUSE also runs a 'Partner' programme to attract sponsorship from the big names in computing. All the well-known names are listed and they are clearly paying a lot of money for the benefits they get from belonging. It is easy to deduce that the partner program produces a revenue stream in excess of 1.5 M dollars per annum.
Of course, being in the UK I have very little first hand experience of EDUCAUSE. Everything I have told you above has come straight from their web site. If you haven't seen it before I can recommend a visit. The URL is easy to remember: http://www.educause.edu/. Go there and you will get a feel for how much work needs to be done if EUNIS wants to become more like EDUCAUSE.
And now back to EUNIS and the strategic workshop. The combined populations of the countries represented in EUNIS are as big as that of the USA yet the revenue from membership subscriptions is a mere few thousand Euro per year. The main reason, of course, is that countries join, not individual universities and colleges. EUNIS has 22 members, yet this newsletter will go to perhaps a couple of hundred separate institutions. Should institutions join EUNIS? Would the sort of sliding scale for membership fees which you can see on the EDUCAUSE web pages work for EUNIS or would there have to be some additional recognition of the economic history of some of our member countries?
As I write these words I realise how little I really know about some basic economic facts. I tend to assume that EDUCAUSE has it easier than EUNIS in that the USA is much more homogeneous than Europe in economic terms so that one subscription scale is acceptable across the whole country. Is this so? I also assume that the spend on higher education per head of population is higher in the USA than in Europe so there are more universities and colleges as potential members. Is this a good assumption? I also feel that there is a higher incidence of successful companies selling into the HE market in the USA and hence available as corporate sponsors. Right or wrong?
The EUNIS conferences are successful, although not yet on the scale of those run by EDUCAUSE. Yet these are generating policy difficulties given that EUNIS itself has very little money. Who 'owns' such a conference? Is it EUNIS, the member country or the host university? Who covers the financial risk and who pockets any profit that may be made? These problems are not new. They existed when I ran the Manchester conference in 1996. However, with the very success of the recent conferences, they are becoming more pressing and solutions need to be found. Some progress is being made and there is now a draft agreement (available for inspection on the EUNIS web pages) which can be used to establish a formal agreement between EUNIS and a providing institution. Nevertheless, the situation will probably be unsatisfactory until EUNIS can amass enough risk capital to properly underwrite future conferences.
So - these are some of the issues that are taxing the brains of your Board of Directors. Do you have a view on how they should be tackled and, if so, how do you make your opinions known? Formally, I suppose, you should discuss them with one of the two representatives of your country and he, or she, will (or may) put them forward at the next General Assembly meeting which will be in Porto. You can, of course, e-mail any member of the Board directly - all their e-mail addresses are on the web pages. But it may be more relevant to start a wider debate. Don't forget that any list member can send to this list as well as receive messages. The principal topic is 'How should EUNIS develop? Should it seek to copy the EDUCAUSE model? If so, how does it manage the necessary growth?'
Well, that's me done for now. I shall be on holiday for the next couple of weeks so if you are going to flood this list with your opinions and suggestions I probably won't see them for a while, unless I'm tempted by the cyber cafes in Majorca. At the present time I'm not sure if I will be at the conference, but if you are going then I hope that you will have a very enjoyable time.
Best wishes
Ron