D. Phillip Woodruff
President - IUVSTA
(1998-2001) Triennium
Dear Colleagues,
Although we are now in
the middle of the current (1998-2001) triennium and my term of office as
president, I am struck how many of the Divisional Committee members and
executive Counsellors are still unaware of many of the aspects of the workings
of the Union and their role in its operation. This is a long-standing problem,
and one for which the officers must bear some of the blame. All of these
individuals are nominated by their national vacuum societies to serve terms of
one or two triennia (i.e. up to 6 years), yet the Executive Council meets only
twice a year, and many members find it difficult to attend all of these meetings
due to constraints on their time and their travel budgets, so the number of
occasions on which Councilors and Divisional Representatives actual meet to
discuss IUVSTA affairs may be small.
In an attempt to address
this problem a Procedures Manual was initiated some years ago, and during the
present triennium this is continuing to develop, especially through the efforts
of Bill Westwood, our Secretary General. To improve accessibility it is now
posted on the IUVSTA web site (which has now gained the more obvious URL of www.iuvsta.org).
The idea of the Procedures Manual is to summarize the actual practice of the
operation of the Union - what is the role of the different officers, what is the
procedure for electing Divisional Committee members or applying for endorsement
of a conference, or even putting together a bid to host the triennial
International Vacuum Congress. The object is to go beyond the strict rules of
the Statutes and explain who does what, and when (and perhaps even why!). There
is still a lot of scope for improvement and expansion of this manual, but it is
already a valuable document to help new active members of the IUVSTA Executive
Council and its Committees and Scientific Divisions to understand their role and
the opportunities they have to influence events of organize IUVSTA-sponsored
scientific activities. Of course, completeness leads to a large document, but
relatively small sections are of primary relevance to new members. One of the
advantages of presenting the material on the web site is that one can easily
access individual parts of the manual; currently the manual is available as a .pdf
file but with a convenient index integrated into the file.
In the future I think it will be important to find a convenient mechanism for ensuring that the most relevant sections are automatically provided to IUVSTA representatives at the start of each triennium. In this way I hope that new (and old!) members will feel better informed and more able to play a positive role from early in their period of office. Getting the right information to people is a constant problem in any organization, and especially one with the huge geographical spread and (necessarily) infrequent meetings of IUVSTA. It is also important that one is not deluged with information, which actually leads to none of it being read. Electronic communication and the Internet certainly make the distribution of information easier, but the quality (and proper quantity) of the information still depends on individuals, and there are clearly still ways in which we can help to ensure that IUVSTA functions with well-informed representatives.