EUNIS Board meeting
Riga Technical University
October 6th, 2012
14:30 to 17:00
Minutes 12/10/2012
1. Welcome and registration of participants
Present:
All members of the Board: Jan Madey (President), Ilkka Siissalo (Vice-President), Hans-Dieter Weckmann (Treasurer), Ramon Grau Sala (Secretary), Mikael Berglund, Gill Ferrell, Pekka Kahkipuro, John Murphy, Arsenio Reis, Lígia Ribeiro.

Permanent guests: Jean-François Desnos (Executive Secretary), Anna Pacholak (Assistant to the President), Yves Epelboin, Kristel Sarlin (past Presidents).

Other guests: Zigmunds Zitmanis (Director, RTU), Kaspars Auzarējs-Auzers, Gatis Praličs (Information Systems Dept., RTU), and Joao Barroso (Professor, UTAD).

2. Approval of minutes from the Board meetings in Vila Real
Approved unanimously.

3. Vacant positions at the Board

The number of Board members is presently ten, due to Nicola Bertazzoni’s resignation from CINECA. The statutes allows up to twelve Board members.
The Board decided:

  • to write to Professor Emilio Ferrari, President of CINECA (Jan Madey), to ask for a CINECA representative at EUNIS, as a replacement for Nicola Bertazzoni.
  • To co-opt Zigmunds Zitmanis at the Board, as authorized by the statutes, waiting for the agreement of the next General Assembly in June 2013.
  • To bear in mind a Eunis 2014 Congress organizer from the University of Abertay should be co-opted at the Board in the future.

4. Report on the Congress 2012 in Vila Real (A. Reis, J. Barroso)
Arsenio Reis and Joao Barroso presented a report on 2012 Congress. Almost 200 attendees were participating. The satisfaction is globally “very good” or “good”. The financial balance is presently + 8156 €, but some expenses (proceedings) are not known precisely yet.
The accounts will be closed November 1st, 2012.
The accounts of EUNIS 2011 will be closed soon (John Murphy).

5. Finances
Hans-Dieter Weckmann presented some numbers about finances:

  • The 2011-2012 fiscal year shows a surplus of 2664 €, for 87 members plus one corporate member (having paid their annual fee).
  • The surplus of the 2012-2013 budget is 5000 €, expecting 100 members paying each 500 €, plus five corporate members.
  • The balance at Nordea Bank is around 95000 €.

6. Membership, members data base
Hans-Dieter Weckmann holds and maintains the members data base in Düsseldorf, assisted by his colleague Harald Spiegl. The Board is conscious it’s a hard and difficult task, and the cleaning has to be permanent. The decision is taken to split the actual data base in three parts:

  • Category I (paying): have an “actual members” data base with the members having paid last year, and those only,
  • Category II (suspending): make a second data base with past members who did not pay last year but could be members again next year,
  • Category III (cancelling): have an archive data base with all other past members, those who resigned explicitly or never answered.

Letters have been prepared to:

  • ask members from Category I to check and if needed correct their data,
  • approach all individuals (except Cat. I) whose emails are listed in the “EUNIS large list” (attendees at EUNIS past events), describing the benefits of being a EUNIS member.
    H. Spiegl is working on the mailings (after correcting the eunis-members@impmc.jussieu.fr
    from the Cat. I data base).

The Board members were asked to help actively in the data base improvement, at least in
context of their countries.

7. New list server
The lists held and maintained (but not updated to date) by Yves Epelboin in Paris, with the SYMPA listserver:

eunis-board@impmc.jussieu.fr
eunis-members@impmc.jussieu.fr
eunis@impmc.jussieu.fr
eunis-bi@impmc.jussieu.fr

should be transferred to Warsaw, the most convenient location where the Eunis domain and server are held. They haveto be maintained by a system administrator using a istserver software, and renamed as:

eunis-board@eunis.org
eunis-members@eunis.org
eunis@eunis.org
eunis-bi@eunis.org

In addition, email addresses could be set for the board (simply aliases) like:

j.madey@eunis.org or jan.madey@eunis.org etc…

8. Improving the web site
The web site quality is progressing, but a number of information need to be updated and/or added, and the site map has to be improved, especially by transferring some information to the private part (which will give value for our corporate members).

The Board members were asked to help in the Eunis web site actualization (i.e. by sharing
news).

9. Expected activities 2012-2013
There was proposed that all Eunis Task Forces are expected as a minimal requirement during
this academic year to:

  • update the information on the web site (with the news on their activity)
  • organize an event (a workshop, a seminar, a conference)
  • prepare a written report

This concerns:

  • RS3G (Simone Ravaioli)
  • ELTF (Gill Ferrell). Gill Ferrel is already preparing a workshop in Lausanne (EPFL) mid March 2013.
  • Bencheit (Ilkka Siissalo)
  • Business Intelligence (Mikael Berglund, Elsa Cardoso)

In addition to these actions, Ramon Grau has proposed he would meet an executive person at the European Commission.

10. Summary about the next Congress in Riga
Jan Madey and the Board congratulated Zigmunds Zitmanis and his staff for the excellence of the preparation of the next Congress in 2013.
Not less than one and a half day were spent by RTU’s staff and the Board to work on the details of documents which have been presented. The Board was impressed by the quality and the accuracy of the work done, as well as by the large venue chosen.
The early announcements of the event in respect of the schedule will also take a part in its
expected great success.
11. Next Board meeting
An additional Board meeting will be held in spring in a location to be defined later (Germany, France or Poland)