Dear EWGLA members,

we are writing you concerning a proposal to change the regulations and mandate of the EWGLA board.

Currently, the board consists of three members and changes every three years. As a result, we effectively "expend" 1 person per year, a rate which we think is not sustainable in the long term. Moreover, changing the board as a whole means that a lot of knowledge is lost after the change (even if previous boards are always very helpful), resulting in a unnecessarily cumbersome start for the new board.

As a result, we suggest to change the regulations and mandate for the board as follows:

1. The board consists of three members from three different countries

2. The mandate of a member starts and ends at a EWGLA meeting.

3. Each member serves for a span of 4 EWGLA meetings, excluding the one she or he came into office. That is, the mandate of a member coming into office at a EWGLA meeting will end four meetings later

4. One member at a time is replaced at every EWGLA meeting.

This will hopefully mitigate the setup costs for new board members and will result in greater continuity and less "loss of knowledge".

As we don't want to decide this ourselves, we think it's best to discuss this at the next meeting in Edinburgh during the EWGLA session and let you vote on it. Until this has been resolved, the current board would stay in power, unless there are objections.

Provided that new rules proposed above are accepted by the EWGLA members, the current board would be willing to initiate the transformation process. That is, one member at a time would stop serving at each of the next three meetings, starting with the one in Edinburgh, and would be replaced by a new member. The first one to leave would be Sergio.

Best wishes,

Jörg, Olivier, and Sergio

----------------------------------------------

Joerg Kalcsics

Lecturer in Operational Research

School of Mathematics

University of Edinburgh

James Clerk Maxwell Building

Peter Guthrie Tait Road

Edinburgh, EH9 3FD, UK

Room: 6226

Phone: +44 (0)131 650 5953

Email: joerg.kalcsics@ed.ac.uk

Web: http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/people/show?person=450