Hello everybody,
Thanks Jörg, Olivier and Sergio for your fantastic work.
After reading your message I have the feeling that you are pulling the pendulum too much to the opposite side. As with your proposal we will have the members of the board devoting an important amount of effort for "training" the new member of the board, every year! Moreover, we will be in a permanent electoral campaign! With all the hassle it implies, including an endless number of emails calling for candidates, and so on. If you forgive the audacity, I will suggest something in between:
A four member board as you suggest, with two members changing every two years. That will contribute enormously to the continuity of the work and will reduce the frequency of by-elections to only one every two years. This should further mitigate set-up costs, together with a considerable reduction in election costs.
Hope this will contribute to the debate in Edinburgh.
Looking forward seeing you all next week.
With best regards,
http://d.ruiz.cunef.edu
CUNEF ˇ Leonardo Prieto Castro, 2 Ciudad Universitaria - 28040 - Madrid ˇ +34 91 448 08 92 ˇ www.cunef.edu
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
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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