Business meeting minutes, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 13 August, 2008

Aug 13, 2008
Toronto, Canada

Chair Michael Myers called the meeting to order at 11:30 after a brief memorial to Heinz Klein, founding member and intellectual contributor to IFIP WG 8.2

Thanks were given to Catherine Middleton, Michael Barrett and colleagues for organizing an excellent conference.

Michael Myers reviewed the working conferences held in the past several years. We tend to have one working conference a year, with refereed papers, proceedings published in book format (now by Springer), and all usual trappings of a conference. We also do what we call Oasis workshops every year, always in association with the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). The workshop is one of main means of getting new members into the group. Abstracts are submitted several months before the workshop, and as many as possible that have something to do with the group are accepted. New PhD students, and experienced researchers with a new, possibly weird idea, get few minutes to talk about it. The wonderful thing about this group is its willingness to debate, to engage, to challenge, and to be open to new ideas.

The next Oasis workshop will be December 2008 in Paris immediately preceding ICIS. The organizers for this workshop are Nathalie Mitev, Kathy McGrath, and Niki Pantelli.

The next working conference will be “The Role of IS in Leveraging Intelligence and Creativity in SMEs” to be held in Guimarães, Portugal, from 21-24 June 2009. Isabel Ramos is the organizer for this conference.

The following year, from 30 March – 4 April 2010, IFIP WG 8.2 will join with WG 8.6 to present the working conference “Human Benefit through the Diffusion of IS Design Science Research,” in Perth, Australia.

The next OASIS workshop will be in December 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Helena (Eija) Karsten volunteered to begin the process of organizing a working conference in Turku, Finland, in 2011.

The following nominations were received for the election of new members:

Tim McLaren (CA)
Kai Reimer (DE)
Joe Feller (IE)
Pat Finnegan (IE)
Tom Butler (IE)

The members present voted unanimously to accept the new members, subject to the secretary’s verification.

Ken Kendall mentioned that there is no new information on IFIP awards. The most recent nominations were Trevor Wood-Harper for the Outstanding Service Award and Michael Myers for the Silver Core Award.

The term of current Chair Michael Myers will end in December 2008. Therefore there is a need for the election of officers. Our typical practice is to ask the vice-chair to accept the nomination for chair and the secretary to accept the nomination for vice-chair. Kevin Crowston has been nominated for the secretary position. Other nominations are welcome. The out-going chair will send out an e-mail within next month regarding the vacancy and will ask for any additional nominations. Following that he will send out the information regarding voting.

The floor was opened to any additional items of new business. Items discussed included the need for an on-line review system, the methods of transfer of knowledge, and a suggestion for the reconsideration of the 2-region model for officer selection. It was suggested that papers in PDF format and panel slides be posted on the WG 8.2 website to provide a history of contents of past conferences.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:25.

Submitted by Nancy L Russo, Vice-Chair
On behalf of Brian Fitzgerald, Secretary