A Message from the Board Member
By Professor Osamu Kusakabe
ISSMGE is a large international learned society which has a membership of 80 member societies with over 18,000 individual members as of March 2009. The Board as policy making and administrative body is primary responsible for communicating closely with officers of these member societies on the issues that the Council decides, as well as with chairpersons of Technical Committee on technical activities.
The present Board strongly believes that we are also responsible for improving the communication with over 18,000 individual members. To improve the communication with the individual members and to promote the communication among the individual members is of essence for future of ISSMGE, not only information and knowledge dissemination for the benefit to the individual members, but also bridging the gap between academicians and practitioners, and integrating senior and young generations in geotechnical community, which would create new areas of science and technology.
Soon after establishing the present Board at Osaka Conference in September 2005, President Pedro Pinto called a preliminary Board meeting and proposed the establishment of Task Force on Communications with possible lunch of ISSMBE Bulletin as the upgrade version of Newsletter. I was appointed for the task of lunching and editing/publishing ISSMGE Bulletin. My former student, Dr. Pongsakorn Punrattanasin, has provided me indispensable support for the task.
After discussions at the two subsequent Board meetings, we started the quarterly publication of ISSMGE Bulletin since March, 2006 with the format you see in this issue. Typical issue includes the message from one of the Board members, view of young generation, reminiscence by senior generation, case history reported by practitioners, TC activity, activity of member society, news and event diary. The Bulletin also provides a page for corporate members. All the previous issue can be accessed and obtained from the front page of ISSMGE website (www.issmge.org). The Board continues our effort to improve the communication by reinforcing editorial capacity of Bulletin and possible updating ISSMGE website.
In order to reinforce the editorial capacity of Bulletin, the Board has tried to establish the network of young geotechnical engineers in representative geographical areas: Africa, Asian, Australasia, Europe and America.
In his letter inviting young members dated March 6, 2009, President Pinto wrote “It is very important the universality of the knowledge and the need for a permanent renewing. ISSMGE wants to play an important role helping the geotechnical community to explore the best ways for research, design, construction and assessment of geotechnical structures safety, in order to reach the expectations and targets of our Society during the third Millennium. It is important to communicate, to share experiences, to compare methodologies and to monitor the results. The benefits of an open dialogue between the academicians, the researchers, the practitioners, contractors and owners are huge. Through our ISSMGE Bulletin we have the responsibility to interact with the Member Societies and also with the individual members. The time demands all arise as we are now on the brink of a new era for ISSMGE. Over the past years a number of developments have taken place and we need to mould the ISSMGE activities for this momentum to capitalize on the potential benefits. In a geotechnical world that every day transforms and advances we face new challenges, the role of ISSMGE is to explore new ways and to be a continuous source of inspiration for today and tomorrow.
Download ISSMGE Bulletin – Volume 3 Issue 1 (pp.1-2)
PDF format
