WP # 12: European Complex Systems Society including scientists from all Complexity Application Areas
WP12 Structuring STREPs environment into an European Complexity Society. The Complexity Pathfinder members establish the society and use a variety of ways to get to all potential members. There is an executive committee with appropriate geographical and discipline representatives that thinks on the missions, goals, special activities and on representing complexity in other European forums etc. The measure of our success will be the existence by 2007 of a European Complexity Science Society capable to support itself (after GIACS ends) by membership fees and including thousands (1000 by 2008) of members as well as corporate members from business and industry.
Leading institutions
BIU - BAR ILAN UNIVERSITY - RAMAT-GAN ISRAEL
OU - THE OPEN UNIVERSITY - MILTON KEYNES UK
CNRS - CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE - PARIS , FRANCE
WP leaders
Prof. Mina Teicher teicher@macs.biu.ac.il
Prof. Jefferey Johnson j.h.Johnson@open.ac.uk
Dr Paul Bourgine bourgine@poly.polytechnique.fr
Objectives
It seems that the beginning of the 21st century is the right time to establish the ECSS: The complexity community is approaching a critical mass, there is growing public awareness to crucial social problems of high complexity, there are no national societies in Complexity in Europe and there is a need to have an organization where STREP members and other complexity people from different fields can communicate and help each other.
The society mandate will be:
- representing the field in the EC (FP6 and ERC) distributing information to members via the bulletin board
- writing mission statements to universities in favour of interdisciplinary research (such as special consideration in promotions, etc.), open channels with Industry, national policy makers, disaster managements,
- publicizing Complexity courses in Europe.
As one can see the mandate of the society is currently taken care of by the CA proposal on Complexity. The idea is that the ECSS will take over upon completion of the CA project ( and will be self sufficient from that point on) . The software tool will be handed over to ECSS, etc. The society will function via standing and ad-hoc committees (continuation of the current WP’s). There will be an executive committee with appropriate geographical and discipline representatives that will think on the missions, goals, registration fees , special activities, etc.
Instruments
We will establish the society and will use a variety of ways to get to all candidate members:
- chain letters to known scientists - asking them to distribute it further the conceptual COMPLEXITY ROADMAP input
- announcements to Research Authorities in the different universities (via EAU the Association of European Universities ) – asking them to email it to all subscribers
- stands at major annual conference(s)
- letters to related Scientific Societies asking them to distribute it among their members direct approach to all the STREPs.