The Operations Committee is chaired by the President-Elect. The Operations Committee is charged with reviewing the operations of the Society in order to (1) determine if its activities are operating efficiently (including evaluating the current Timeline of Society activities) and recommend any improvements that seem desirable, (2) provide advice when items arise about changes in its operations, and (3) engage in long range planning to ensure the continued health and vitality of the Society.
Each year the Operations Committee should collect committee reports and update the Operations Handbook/Webpages, adding the committee reports and relevant results of the council and business meetings.
2015 Operations Committee Report
Composition: Michel Morange (Chair) Linnda Caporael Andrew Inkpen Isabella Sarto-Jackson The operations Committe is charged with reviewing the operations of the Society in order to (1) determining if its activities are operating efficiently and recommend any improvement that seem desirable, (2) provide advice when items arise about changes in its operations, and (3) engage in long range planning to ensure the continued health and vitality of the Society.
Werner Callebaut had a precise project concerning the missions of the four-member Operations Committee. Isabella Sarto-Jackson, working with him at the head of the Konrad Lorenz Institute, and new member of ISHPSSB, was to look at the way the Society operated, pinpoint weaknesses in its organization. From her observations, Werner would propose the Committee a list of issues for which we would propose changes of the Operations.
This project was abruptly interrupted by the death of Werner, and we were unable to find any document that would have helped us to see the directions in which Werner wanted to modify the Operations of the Society.
Therefore, what we did was simply to revive a tradition that had been abandoned in recent years, and to ask each of the Committee Chairs to send a report of their activities during the period 2013-2015. These reports will be addressed to the Chairs of the 2015-2017 Committees to help them in their new tasks, and put on the website. In addition, we proposed that the Committees whose tasks are not precisely assigned by the Operations manual, such as the Membership Development Committee and the Education Committee, will have to describe, a few months after their nomination, the directions they want to explore, and the issues on which they intend to focalize their efforts.
We had also additional recommendations concerning three Committees: the Membership Development Committee, the Education Committee and the Publication Committee. Concerning the first, our conviction was that the most important issue was to favour interdisciplinarity, a conclusion also reached by this Committee. We considered that the Education Committee had to find a new dynamics and a new role, whereas the Publications Committee had to focus on the reorganization of the website and on communications: in both cases, our expectations have met those of the Council members, and these Committees have been reorganized in these directions.