Representatives of five international organisations met on the occasion of the 8ème Congrès International de l’Union Européenne de Systemique in Brussels from 20 to 22 October:
• Andrée Piecq, President of the European Union for Systemics (UES)
• Gerhard Chroust, Secretary General of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR)
• Raúl Espejo, Director-General of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)
• Matjaz Mulej, President of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS)
• Pierre Bricage, Secretary General of IASCYS
• Wolfgang Hofkirchner, President of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS)
In the first of two meetings instigated by Wolfgang Hofkirchner and Matjaz Mulej and organised by Pierre Bricage, Wolfgang Hofkirchner presented his ideas about the next European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR) which the BCSSS under his chairmanship will organise in April 2012. He invited all organisations to contribute to he success of the conference. The IFSR committed to support the Conference in several ways. The WOSC is already partner of the event.
It was also agreed to make efforts to coordinate information about systemic conferences and to organise a collection of abstracts of most/all published systemic articles at least from systemic journals. This collection could possibly be done automatically. It was felt that the IASCYS could be the appropriate neutral platform for the collection of such information and for making it available to the systems community. The IFSR offered the use of its web-site to host such information.
It was recognised that language is a problem also in the systems community. UES caters mainly to French speaking scientists, while the IFSR has a large majority of English speaking associations. It was also recognised that here is a strong community of Spanish-speaking systemists, especially in Latin America. Furthermore it is also of high importance to take into account the large systems communities in China and Japan.
The second meeting discussed the role of the IASCYS, originally founded by the IFSR, in view of the newly established cooperation with UES and WOSC. It was the common consensus that the nomination procedure for the IASCYS should better reflect the new cooperation.
With respect to systems conferences (there are supposedly some 40 every year) the role of world-wide conferences was discussed. It was observed that the bi-annual EMCSR conferences, the three-annual conferences of both UES and WOSC together with some other could complement one another by coordinating them and sharing some topics and ideas. This would provide to the general audiences the feeling of a certain continuity between these various conferences.