[MCFA Int] Re: Sixth meeting of the UK group

[Danny Roobaert <roobaert@DROPMEnada.kth.se>]

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Dear Olaf,
Dear MCFA members,

Thank you to the UK members for providing the minutes of their last
meeting. It really looks like a productive and nice discussion has
being conducted for building our association. However, I have one
major remark on the statutes proposal discussion.

Why base the statutes of the MCFA on an association organised in
regional/national groups only? As questioned earlier already by
different persons: why should we divide Europe again in
national/geographical entities? Now at the moment, these groups are
the most dynamic and active part of the association, but one should
keep in mind that we are only in the beginning of our association: an
association that comprises mostly members who did not finish their
fellowship yet. However soon, we will finish our fellowship and we
might start to have other needs. Probably, we will become even more
mobile and work in several countries in a continuously-more integrated
Europe. Hence, why should we stay active -only- via a national group?
Another concern is, some members might like to found special
(scientific) interest groups within the association. Special interest
group that can have more dedicated contacts with the industry or other
organisations etc..., and filling in needs of another kind than purely
geographically-related ones. However, the current and proposed
statutes does not foresee such non-geographically constraint
subgroups. Hence, why not discuss the possibility to redefine and
enlarge the notion of national/regional/local group to the notion of a
more general "subgroup"? At least, if one is really concerned about
flexibility and generality of the statutes. Finally one more argument
that should not be overlook, is that in the future, the large majority
of potential members for the association will consists precisely of
these ex-fellows, and not adequately involving them might seriously
limit the full potential of the association.

I proposed these ideas also in an earlier document (see:
http://www.csb.ki.se/mcfa/docum/statprop.html or
http://www.csb.ki.se/mcfa/mcfa_top.html ), where also details
and a proposal for this change of the statutes can be found.

With kind regards,

Danny



-- 
Danny Roobaert
Marie Curie research fellow
Computational Learning, Vision and Active Perception
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm/Sweden       
Email: roobaert@DROPMEnada.kth.se
Tel: +46 (0)8/790.6209 or +46 (0)70/775.1043 
http://simone.neuro.kuleuven.ac.be/danny.html


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