Minutes of the IFIP 8.3 Working Group Business Meeting held in Bled, Slovenia, 2.00 p.m. Wednesday, 15th July 1998, Hotel Golf

It was reported by George Widmeyer, Chairman of the Working Group that 68 members have attended to the conference, from whom 40 paid his/her conference-fee. The participants represented 12 countries One third were students or represented local enterprises.

The conference was supported by the Republic of Slovenia, Ministry of Science and Technology, The Slovenian Science Foundation, Jozef Stefan Institute, LSE, SAS Institute, Slovenija, Mercator d.d., Temida, d.o.o., Oracle Software, d.o.o., Iskra Racunalniki, d.o.o., Telekom Slovinia, d.d..

George Widmeyer on behalf of the members thanked Dina Berkeley, Patrick Brezillon, Vladislav Rajkoviè and the Ph.D students helped him for their efforts in organising the event so fluently.

Vladislav Rajkovic gave the summary of the current conference which focused on issues related to developing context-sensitive decision support systems (DSS). The wide variety of the presentations showed that there are a number of context that need to be taken into account (e.g. cultural, organisational, task-, role-, or individual-related) depending on the purpose of the DSS and its target users.

This conference initiated a discussion on these issues which are of vital of importance to designing effective and adaptable DSS. It brought together contributions from all disciplines as the issues in question cut across different disciplines, each made its unique contribution to the topic.

According to the IFIP rules someone¢s Working Group membership lapses if a member fails to participate in some agreed number of events, usually two or three consecutive events. According to this rule George Widmeyer updated the membership list and circulated it during the Business Meeting. This list contained 74 names, from whom 25 do not meet the requirement mentioned above. George Huber, H. Postma and Markku Saaksjarvi requested to drop. The others have not indicated their willingness to be a member and most of them could not be reached by e-mail.

The following participants were formally proposed and welcomed as members of IFIP WG 8.3 having attended two full meetings of the group.

The Business Meeting of WG 8.3 on Context Sensitive Decision Support Systems had to elect its new Chairman, since the term of George Widmeyer was over. The Business Meeting put stress on the continuation of the chairmanship, since all the members were fully satisfied with the work of the former Chairman. George Widmeyer was willing to continue to be the Chairman of the Working Group so he was re-elected for an other 3 years. 100% of the member to be present on the Business Meeting voted for him.

George Widmeyer confirmed that Andrew McCosh will act as Vice Chair and Zita Paprika as Secretary till the end of 2000.

Two concrete venues were considered, but after a short discussion practically everybody accepted that the next 2000 regular working conference should be held in Stockholm, Sweden. It is becoming a habit by now that every second conference is held in a large city, mainly in capitals. From this points of view Stockholm seems to be a good choice. Stockholm University will organise the event on its campus which has pretty good connections to the airport. Furthermore we can use the University¢s facilities which can lower the participation fee. The Chairman of the Program Committee will be Sven Carlsson, who will set up a local organising committee.

The editors of the conference book will be the members of the Conference Committee. Someone suggested that it would be advisable to set up a Review Committee with 10 members who could help the editors in reviewing the papers. The Business Meeting agreed to delegate this question to Sven Carlsson who will be the Chair of the Conference.

After a long discussion the members agreed on the theme of the next conference. Finally they have two suggestions:

• Managing Knowledge in Decision Support
• Knowledge Management for Decision Support.

It will be also the Conference Committee's competence to decide on the concrete title.

The outcome of the planning process of the next conference is presented here:

Since the length of the book published has its limits it was a widely accepted suggestion that in the future it is also advisable to organise parallel sessions and publish those papers which were presented in the parallel sessions in a supplement.

The meeting closed 3:30 p.m.

Zita Paprika

04.08.98