During the last EURO XV - INFORMS XXXIV Conference in Barcelona, I have been kindly invited by the President of the Spanish OR Society, Prof. J. Pastor, to attend the traditional meeting/lunch of the presidents of the OR Societies within EURO. Of course the meal was fine and the attendance very pleasant as you may think. More seriously it was a good yet rare opportunity for talking together and becoming fully aware that many national societies are faced to similar problems and several presidents share some interrogations. Since this reunion, I have been discussing with friends and thinking about a number of issues raised there. I have written down the result of these reflections and friends have convinced me to submit them to public discussion. Of course, these are personal feelings and although I am much indebted to a number of colleagues and friends for their precious advises, nobody else but me can be held responsible for these considerations.

In my view, the main question underlying the conversations at the presidents' meeting is "What can be nowadays the role of the national societies?"  Is there still any point in maintaining societies organised on a national basis? Researchers certainly see as more profitable to discuss with specialists active in the same sub-field rather than having more or less platonic conversations with colleagues working in other sub-fields just because they live in the same country. Clearly, there are many (perhaps too many) specialised or non specialised international conferences where you can meet the best specialists of any domain; so why organising national conferences? Some reasons that remain are:

• national conferences are the place where young researchers can make their first experience;
• they are a meeting place where all people interested in OR in a small geographic area can communicate; potentially, it is a factor of cohesion between fundamental research, applied academic research and industrial applications; it is important for the overall influence of OR in the economic and cultural life;
• more trivially, but perhaps the most concrete reason, the costs for attending national conferences are lower (at least in small countries) and speakers usually express themselves in their own language which is the language spoken in the country; this eases the participation of students and industry (my own country is a notable exception to this rule since our national congresses are held in English, whereas the mother language of most participants is either Flemish or French ! Of course there are extra-scientific reasons to that).

Many societies publish newsletters. Do they contain information that are both useful and cannot be found in OR/MS Today or in the British newsletter or in the EURO Bulletin? Probably but how many people read them?

Is there anything that can be done to make the national societies more lively or should we let them die and make EURO a society of individual members ? The latter question is too big an issue to be discussed here; I shall concentrate on the former and try to make a few constructive suggestions.

Most small OR societies are small because they mainly have academic members. For becoming bigger, one can try to address a wider audience, in particular trying to be more present and better perceived in companies, public sector, organisations. How to reach that goal? One way is through organising seminars and workshops where our best "communicators" disseminate information about the new techniques and methods developed in our field; this of course must be done through a discourse at the appropriate technical level and in a practically oriented mood; it is highly desirable to let that job be done by instructors having a minimum of experience in (true) applications. I believe that there is a huge potential of demand for such seminars; suffice it to look at the programme advertised in the newsletter of the British OR Society. In these days where theoretical advances are increasingly evaluated through their applicability and the profit that can be made by using them, we have to convince that our discipline can help to save money and increase efficiency. This is a key issue if we want more resources for developing our research and if we want to attract young researchers.

Needless to say, setting up such activities requires resources, willingness, efforts and skills which are not easily available especially to small societies. Even if we don't throw ourselves into such ambitious projects, we may perhaps improve things especially by developing international co-operation. For instance, small societies could periodically organise joint events such as conferences. This can raise financial problems for non-neighbouring countries but as shown by the example of the video conference organised in Italy and Belgium during the last AIRO meeting in Saint-Vincent (Aosta, Italy), there could be intermediate solutions.

Another point is the possible co-operation in the publication of national journals. There are examples of groups of countries putting together their resources for publishing a journal; it is the case of CEJORE, jointly edited by the Austrian, Croat, Czech, Hungarian and Slovak societies. Without going so far and merge together existing journals one could suggest several actions that could make them more attractive or more widely accessible; for instance:

• advertise the contents (titles and abstracts) of the national journals in all societies within EURO (and perhaps IFORS);
• make national journals more easily available to members of the other societies within EURO (and perhaps IFORS);
• re-publish a selection of the best papers published in the national journals; this could be done in a new journal that would be available at low cost to the members of all EURO societies. This journal could have been EJOR but unfortunately EJOR is very expensive and hence cannot stand on everybody's shelves;
• (variant of the previous) offer the editorial board of the other journals to re-publish the papers that have appeared in a national journal; the selection could be done according to the perceived interests of each national community.

To conclude, a word about the role of EURO. EURO could very well play a supporting and stimulating role in the co-operation between its member societies. Of course EURO does help the national societies especially in the Eastern countries but at the same time some of the tools set up by EURO, the EURO conferences and EJOR, the journal of EURO, tend to short-circuit the national societies : why meeting at national level, whereas larger conferences at the European level are organised? Why publishing national journals whereas EJOR is widely distributed? So EURO empties the national societies of a part of their "raison d'être" but does not stimulate and help them enough to be a link between all persons potentially concerned with OR in each country. By saying this I don't want to criticise the action of EURO, in particular EJOR and the EURO conferences which are invaluable tools; I just want to draw the attention on the difficulties of the national societies, in the hope that it could open a discussion between EURO and its member societies and lead to some positive outcomes.
 

Prof. Marc PIRLOT
Faculté Polytechnique de Mons
Service de Math. & Rech. Op.
Rue de Houdain, 9
B-7000 MONS  (Belgium)
Tel: +32 65 374 682
Fax: +32 65 374 689
pirlot@mathro.fpms.ac.be
 
This article has been published in the AIRO n°3/97, and is part of an AIRO initiative taken after the meeting of national ORS Presidents during the EURO Conference in Barcelona, July 1997. This article has been also published in the EURO Bulletin (Summer-Fall'97).