Recommended Actions to Increase the Diversity of Academic Disciplines Involved in UCGIS Activities. 29 January 1997
At the UCGIS Council Meeting in Denver a working group was established to suggest actions to the UCGIS Board that might increase the diversity of academic backgrounds of individuals actively participating in UCGIS. Members of this ad hoc committee include Harlan Onsrud (University of Maine), Carolyn Hunsaker (Oak Ridge National Lab), Art Getis(San Diego State University), Raymond Dezzani (Boston University), and Karl Longstreth (University of Michigan). Following are our recommended actions.
The UCGIS represents the interests of the geographic information sciences. It seeks to have associated with it those individuals and institutions that foster and maintain a commitment to GIS. The member institutions represent organizations that are supportive of our goals. In this regard, our doors are open to all scholars at our member institutions for them to participate in our activities. Those who now represent their institutions (delegates) should take it upon themselves to disseminate information about the activities of the UCGIS on their campuses. They should encourage interested colleagues to take an active part in the work of the UCGIS. The UCGIS will facilitate that communication process by helping institutional representatives disseminate relevant information.
We ask all UCGIS delegates to identify as many campus colleagues as is possible who are concerned with the geographic information sciences and provide our organization with the address of a local list server through which UCGIS central can occasionally contact all those individuals. Your local list will be included as a subscribing address to UCGIS- PrivateMailList.[1] In the alternative, if you do not wish to set up a local list, please provide us with the individual names and e-mail addresses of all of your campus colleagues interested in GI science. We will add them as individual subscribers to UCGIS-PrivateMailList .
The question of academic diversity will be answered by the nature of the various member campus lists. On some campuses we can assume that scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will be interested in GIS while on other campuses the scholarly focus may be narrower. In any case, it should be our goal to reach out to INDIVIDUALS, rather than disciplines (an artifact of university organization), who have, or would have, a sincere desire to know more about the activities of the UCGIS.
1. Create a comprehensive list of all personnel at all UCGIS institutions involved in GI science teaching or research and maintain an electronic UCGIS-PrivateMailList (An address list for sending hard mail to these people is also desirable but a lesser priority)
Communication is critical. Properly maintained mailing lists are one of the most important assets of an organization and should be a high priority for UCGIS in reaching the audience it wants to reach. The UCGIS- PrivateMailList should include the electronic addresses for all those people that were listed on an institution's membership application as being involved in GIS teaching or research activities. In order to avoid junk e-mail and to minimize personal requests to be removed from the list, this mail list should be used only infrequently for important UCGIS announcements and should only be used by UCGIS board members, committee chairs, or lead delegates.
We need the ability to contact directly all people interested in geographic information science at our member institutions. Going through a non-automated tree structure doesn't work in a timely or efficient manner, if at all, at some member institution sites. The UCGIS- PrivateMailList should be maintained such that any delegate would have access to the content of the list for their institution and it would be the responsibility of the lead delegate at each institution to update the individuals on the list as needed by sending a message to the UCGIS- PrivateMailList custodian or by updating their own local UCGIS list server. A standard list of people at our member institutions for hard copy mailings is also desirable and would include the department address and phone number of each individual.
2. Create a UCGIS-All@ucgis.org list that extends beyond individuals at our member institutions
Create a list-server to which any person interested in UCGIS discussions could voluntarily subscribe or unsubscribe at any time whether or not they are at a UCGIS institution. It is assumed that at least all delegates and committee chairs would subscribe to this list. This list would promote openness of discussions about UCGIS business among individuals throughout the nation as well as internationally.
3. Have major UCGIS documents reviewed from the context of multiple disciplines
For documents such as research agenda white papers and education agenda white papers, inter-disciplinary/multi-disciplinary teams should be involved in writing, or at the least reviewing, papers from the perspectives of the varied disciplines involved in GI science. Documents need to be assessed in the language of different disciplines in order to avoid confusion in the usage of terms. However, items for general information should be written in good straightforward English with no need to translate it into, say, the language of computer science. We should draw broadly from the individuals identified in III. 1 for these reviews.
4. Facilitate the publication of articles for a diverse set of disciplines
Articles should be written for the journals or trade magazines of various disciplines (e.g. geology, library science, health, etc.) to introduce those disciplines to GI science and research topics. Requests to write such articles should be made to specialists in the germane disciplines from our own member institutions. When needed or the opportunity arises, the council or board should also ask persons to prepare documents for general audiences, say, for SCIENCE, or for news releases.
5. The Board should evaluate annually the under-representation of disciplines using the information from item III. 1 above and ask the membership to actively solicit participation by additional individuals when appropriate.
In reference to items II., III 1., and III 2. above we might want to reconfigure our UCGIS mail lists as follows:
UCGIS-Board@ucgis.org
UCGIS-CommitteeChairs@ucgis.org
UCGIS-LeadDelegates@ucgis.org
UCGIS-AllDelegates@ucgis.org
These would all be small lists and relatively easy to maintain.
We would then have two additional lists as described above:
1. UCGIS-All@ucgis.org
2. UCGIS-PrivateMailList@ucgis.org[1]
[1] This suggestion has been implemented as "Members@ucgis.org." Some institutions have established a local deflector, to better manage the dynamics of local participation. Others have submitted local participant addresses to postmaster@ucgis.org.