Dear all,
Since the CIDOC Conference in 2000 in Ottawa, I have been chairing the
CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group to the best of my abilities, personally
devoted to the highst possible intellectual and professional quality of
the work of this group and its dissemination world wide. It has been
always a continued fruitful experience and great personal pleasure,
particularly the contact, acquaintances and friendship across all
cultures and forms of knowledge.
Since many years we have tried to engage younger colleagues in the
leadership. The work of the SIG requires a demanding combination of
knowledge about a series of disciplines dealing with evidence from the
past; the logic of knowledge representation and its application in real
life systems; philosophical - epistemological considerations about the
use of formal ontology; the rationale and community processes for making
international standards; and finally the knowledge and understanding of
the utility of the specific methods developed and used by this Group
over the years.
As the members of the Group were slowly changing, I came more and more
in the position of being the one who could easily recall the rationale
and experiences that had led to various kinds of modeling methods and
methods for decision making, things that should have been explicitly
documented in a much earlier phase. This has not made it easier to
motivate and educate younger colleagues in the methods of leading such a
group and their reasons, and not just for learning the contents of the
Model.
However, as time passes, due to my physical conditions, I feel no longer
in the position to effectively lead this Group. Luckily recently,
several gifted younger colleagues have already engaged effectively in
the management of the Group and we hope many more will soon follow, and
bring in their skills, new applications, ideas and developments and
build up their own experiences. Due to the comlexity of the work
required, from now on the Group should much more aim at active,
conscious collaboration of people with complementary skills, better two
generations younger (as I was when I started working with CRM), based on
democratic and open procedures.
The new chair and deputy chair(s) should be a group keeping the quality
of the work and activity level high, organize meetings and formal
collaborations, formal contact with CIDOC and engage people to
participate in the work. CRM has become a widely used standard and it is
clear (at least to me) that the SIG meetings should be a forum for
initiatives using or planning to use CRM. In addition, we need
scientific development and maintenance and keep the strong links with
FORTH both for scientific reasons and for the maintenance our
infrastructure, as long as FORTH is able to provide these services to
and in official agreement with ICOM Documentation.
Formally the SIG is a working group under ICOMs international committee
ICOM Documentation (formerly known as CIDOC), but there had been no
statutes/bylaws describing its activity, only the general authority of
ICOM Documentation and its General Assembly for the existence of the
Working Group and all its official decisions and recommendations. The
somewhat ad hoc editorial group organizing the SIG meetings since the
pandemic has formulated a draft for by-laws future organisation of the
work of the CRM SIG, in compliance with the recent general regulations
for ICOM Documentation Working Groups. An important new point is the
periodical election of the chair, deputy chairs and a secretary. The
bylaws should be discussed at the October meeting, and hopefully we
agree on a final draft, which has to be accepted at the AGM of ICOM
Documentation.
I will formally step down at the October meeting and we need an interim
steering committee for say a year until elections can be held. It is
useful that we keep the good and close relations with FORTH. Therefore I
suggest the following composition of an Interim Steering Committee
subject to agreement by CRM-SIG in the upcoming meeting Oct. 14-17,
2025: As interim chair I will suggest Pavlos Fafalios, an active
participant in the SIGs work for many years, and assistant professor at
the Technical University of Crete and affiliated researcher at FORTH;
Two of the current deputy chairs, Dominic Oldman and George Bruseker are
willing to continue in the interim committee; Christian-Emil Ore wish to
step down at this point but will continue in the SIG's activities; Eleni
Tsouloucha at FORTH, the de facto secretary of the SIG, is also willing
to continue.
The draft for the new bylaws can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18DWCoj3V1bPRbAT42DmJnbNSiRge2thB
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/18DWCoj3V1bPRbAT42DmJnbNSiRge2thB?usp=sharing&ouid=102982314589061437159&rtpof=true&sd=true>
Martin Doerr
--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Email:[email protected]
Web-site:http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Email:[email protected]
Web-site:http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Email:[email protected]
Web-site:http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
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