Minutes of the Business Meeting

Decision Support in the Internet Age

July 4th to 7th, 2002 – University College Cork, Ireland

 

 

The business meeting was held on July 6th, 2002. 34 members and supporting friends of WG 8.3 were present. The agenda consisted of 10 issues.

 

1.Welcome

 

At the beginning of the meeting Andrew McCosh, chairman of the working group thanked the work of the organisers and the conference chair and co-chairs, namely Frederic Adam, Jean-Charles Pomerol, Patrick Brezillon and Patrick Humphreys.

 

2. Membership

 

The conference was very successful. We had one hundred and five participants, eighteen new member applicants. Applications for membership of the group were approved and remitted to the officers for further processing. This time there were no deletions from the membership list.

 

3. Report on the conference

 

Frederic Adam gave some statistics reporting on the conference. 61 of the 105 participants had full registration. The conference broke even. The structure of the costs and revenues were roughly the following in euro:

 

Costs

 

Revenues

 

Proceedings

  6,500

Fees

24,500

CD

  2,100

Sponsors

  4,000

Catering

10,000

Sales

  2,000

Stationery, bank, bag etc

Surplus.

10,000

  1,900

 

 

 

 

 

4. List of the next conference themes

 

Six different topics were suggested as the topic of the next conference. In brackets you will find the votes each of them has got.

 

On the basis of the votes three topics were merged and the title of the next conference was constructed.  The programme committee has worked on this matter since the meeting, and they have defined the conference topic to be:- Decision Support in an Uncertain and Complex World.   The programme committee and the organising chairman have also proposed, since the meeting, that the conference title should be “The 2004 IFIP International Conference on Decision Support Systems”, and the short acronym should be “DSS2004”.  These last two items were not discussed at the Business Meeting, but are included for the convenience of members. 

 

5. Programme Committee of the next conference

 

The Programme Chairman of the next conference will be Prof. Graeme Shanks of Melbourne. George Widmeyer and Sven Carlsson will act as co-chairmen. Three of them will decide on the final topics and title of the next conference. We will have a small Organising Committee, which will get together twice, and a small core will act on behalf of the committee. Steering Committee members will be session chairmen during the next conference.

 

6. Location of the next conference

 

There were four potential options for the next conference’s location. Zakopane was treated as a future option. Participants from Dubai understood that they just attended the group and later can repeat their offer. Practically Budapest and Prato (near Florence) were competing for the opportunity. Budapest has already hosted the working group. Prato is in Tuscany, it is a small medieval town 18 km from Florence. Monash University has a campus in the city, they hold 3,500 sq meter in a palazzo and two research labs. Australian participants were very active in the working group, they presented 34 papers in the last five conferences. The campus is 10 km from the airport. The conference fee will be similar to 2002 in Prato according to the calculations: 370 euro. Doctoral consortium will meet just before the conference. Florence was selected as the location of the next conference, Monash University in Italy is the next host. The date will be as usual: first half of July, 2004.

 

 

7. Publication opportunities

 

Jean-Charles Pomerol has made arrangements with the editors of four journals to allow conference participants to submit their papers. He asked the participants to send their papers to the journal editors, indicating that it is from the conference.

 

8. Vice-Chairman election

 

Because of the death of former Vice-Chairman, Bengt Lundberg in December 2001, new election was held involving two candidates Patrick Brezillon and Sven Carlsson.  Patrick Brezillon was nominated by Patrick Humphreys, while Sven Carlsson was supported by George Widmeyer. In a very close competition Sven Carlsson got more votes than Patrick Brezillon, so Sven Carlsson was elected.

 

9. Task groups

 

During the business meeting and later members and friends were invited to join one of the five task groups. There were 4+1 initiations:

·        Knowledge management task group will be co-ordinated by George Widmeyer.

·        The task group on ethics will be led by Andrew McCosh

·        Frederic Adam will co-ordinate the task group on the decision making process. They will collect case studies in decision making.

·        Patrick Humphreys will co-ordinate a joint task group on OR-based DSS, in which members of EURO Working Group on DSS will also take part.

·        Members interested in mobile information systems can join to the task group on this issue in WG 8.1.

 

10. Joint events ahead

 

[1] IFIP WG 8.5 and IFIP WG 8.3 will have a joint conference on E-government in May 2003.

[2] EURO DSS will organise its 21st working group meeting on DSS in 4-7 May, 2003 in Luxembourg. Pascale Zarate shared the information of the topic, which is Distributed Decision Making and Man Machine Cooperation.

 

The WEB site of the working group will be maintained by George Widmeyer and Patrick Humphreys. Thanks for their contribution.

 

 

 

Zita Zoltay Paprika

Secretary