From Global Communications Newsletter, January 2011
By Roberto Saracco, Director, Sister Societies, IEEE Communications Society
In the last 10 years ComSoc has consistently sought to establish ties with other Societies with a local footprint. The reason for that is still valid today.
IEEE ComSoc is a international organization providing a global reach and global perspective. It is to the benefit of all its members if this global reach can be complemented with a local focus. Indeed, many ComSoc members are also members of their local Society because there they can find the desired ties with their territory. The goal of setting up agreements with local Society is to extend this local view and perspective also to engineers living in a different area.
As the world shrinks it gets more and more interesting to share experiences among different realities understanding the local perspective. Additionally, ComSoc members are part of a mostly homogeneous community whilst local Societies very often include different branches of engineering, civil engineering, electronic engineering, ...
As communications becomes more and more pervasive, the possibility of being exposed to a varied world is increasingly important. During 2010 we have reached the 30 Sister Societies mark, an important figure, giving us a broad coverage of the world. We are still missing some parts of the world, like central Africa, an area that is likely, and hopefully, to see a significant evolution in the coming years, and Australia, but we are working on this. So expect some good news in 2011.
In these last two years we have managed to establish ties with organizations that are slightly different from the ones I have just presented, having a global (or regional) footprint or a complementary area of operation. Notably, we have established ties with EWI, the East West Institute that is addressing policy and political issues, with FITCE, the European Organizations clustering all European Telecommunications Associations also dealing with policy issues.
Having reached this milestone we are now looking to exploit what has been built over the years rather than focussing on further expanding the number of agreements (with the exception of Central Africa and Australia, as I previously mentioned). One concrete step that has been taken is the appointment of a liaison officer in Chapters co-located with each Sister Society and a COMSOC officer for each global Society.
This should ensure more effective communications and better exploitation of the relationship. Next years we will be establishing a metric to measure the effectiveness of each agreement, in terms of joint activities: cosponsored conferences, exchange of lecturers, presentation at each other events, participation in each other events, number of members of one organization joining the other, publication of papers in each other’s magazines and journals.