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TOWARDS 2000
Another of the major issues highlighted in the
provisional paper by the WG
Strategic Planning
was how
IIW was seen from a global perspective. With Member
Countries of IIW now distributed worldwide there was a
need to grow the momentum on deciding how to best service
these countries. There was also a widely held view within IIW
that it was not making itself sufficiently visible to the world
at large and that the main vehicle for promoting IIW, the
Welding in the World
journal, was not serving as useful
a purpose as it might have and was less appealing
than many other publications. It was also considered
in the strategic plan that
Welding in the World
could
be more attractive and therefore would receive a wider readership if it were to contain
items of relevant news as well as publishing technical documents.
12
One rather undisguised
issue was that the journal was bilingual, being published in both English and French, a
further disincentive for the readership and limiting the number of articles in any one issue,
while translation added greatly to the costs of publishing. This problem was resolved when
English was adopted as the preferred language of IIW in 1994. Bramat was to agree with
this resolution and was to comment that ‘The English language was better used by all the
participants as far as it prevailed as a worldwide language of exchange. Dropping the French
language was not a major technical problem and it was agreed, in principle, to adopt English
as the official language of IIW.’
13
Bramat also identified real issues experienced by a number of individ
uals and Member Countries in obtaining the greatest benefits from IIW. The
implication from his conclusions was that ‘…the vehicle itself is satisfactory
but its journeys and destinations needed to be defined within the context of a
changing world’.
14
Bramat’s comments echoed to some extent the words of
Weck two decades earlier.
The changing world was no better emphasised than by IIW’s limited facilities for
communication at that time. Contact by telephone, telex and fax were considered more than
adequate when the WG
Strategic Planning
’s paper was delivered in the early 1990s. Thus
the strategic plan did not take into account that by 1990 the World Wide Web had come
into being and Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows 3 had made its debut, both heralding great
changes in communication in the years to come.
The faith placed in conventional means of communication, therefore, had to change
significantly. Importantly, IIW had already shown excellent leadership on other technical
issues such as the development of a computerised database containing records of technical
documents prepared by its various Working Units and making the information contained
Michel Bramat