Joining nations 1947-1990

54

JOI lNG

1 ATIONS

The Executive Council's initial review of the IIW's working me– thods was based mainly on the views expressed in Estoril but its report gave rise to so many comments as to necessitate a further study and the promise of a second report in 1982. The first report, adopted in l 98 l, dealt primarily with the need to reconcile the requirement for teamwork in the Commissions with the desire that the IIW should be a forum for the presentation of individual work to a large audience. The conclusion was that the Public Session and Colloquium should each year be on the same subject and constitute a two-day international conference, open to all, within the framework of the Annual Assembly. It was also suggested that a most valuable function of the Commissions was the preparation of state of the art reports and that the sale of Welding in the World might be increased if it were published by an international publishing house. Another difficult issue which was tackled at the 1981 Assembly was the proposal that a Commission on Research should be estab– lished. This arose out of a meeting in Osaka of representatives of welding research centres who considered that a permanent forum for the exchange of information and the co-ordination of work would be desirable. This proposal was examined by a representative group at Oporto which concluded, with the approval of the Governing Council, that a provisional Commission (identified by the abandoned number VII) on welding research strategy and collaboration should be estab– lished under the Chairmanship of Professor Arata (Japan). It fell to the lot of the new President, Mr Skriniar, to conduct the lengthy discussions of the Executive Council on the numerous com– ments received from the national delegations on the first report on the working methods of the IIW. These discussions resulted in a second report which was submitted to, and adopted by, the Govern– ing Council in Ljubljana in l 982. This carried further the proposals contained in the first report with detailed plans for an international conference at the 1983 Assembly, and for the transfer of Welding in the World to a commercial publisher. It was also proposed that means should be found, for example poster sessions, to make more widely known the existence of individual contributions to the Commissions. In separate appendices, detailed arguments were set out for rejecting proposals that French should be dropped as an official language and that there should be a single secretariat. All these conclusions were unanimously approved by the Governing Council and the IIW was thus set on a slightly different course although the changes were primarily formalising trends already in evidence, notably the recent