1999 Annual Meeting

1999 CIB W78 Annual Meeting
Monday May 31
Vancouver, Canada

Minutes of 1998 Meeting

These were accepted as a true record of the meeting.

Actions arising

All actions arising were addressed elsewhere on the agenda.

The Work Programme

• International IT Surveys
  The opportunity to replicate quantitative international surveys that had been conducted in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Ireland and elsewhere, was raised. Details of the questionnaire that had been used, data analysis conducted, and results from Scandinavia and Nordic countries was available on a Danish Technical University web site at http://www.ifp.dtu.dk/~it/itint.htm Anyone interested in extending these surveys to their own countries should contact Professor Rob Howard at rh@gk.dtu.dk who was coordinating this activity.

• Use of the Internet
  The commission continued to offer its support to the publication of the electronic journal ITCon. Extending the work in using the Internet to support coordinating ongoing international work in the area, Dr Ziga Turk from Slovenia made a proposal to create a bibliographic database of relevant publications. This would be organised by Dr Turk creating a web-based template for the database and commission members and others being invited to populate the database. Details of progress with this project would be made known to members through the W78 e-mail mailing list.

• Relationship to VR in Construction Group
  Gustav Coetzee of CSIR in South Africa, outlined the work that had been conducted to date by TG22 concerned with VR in Construction. The decision of the CIB Board to terminate this group and encourage it to participate with W78 activities was noted. It was decided that all members of the VR task group should be added to the W78 mailing list and invited to participate in the commission`s activities. The need for future workshops of the commission to explicitly include a VR theme was noted.

Future Meetings

• 2000
  Arrangements for the next workshop and meeting of the commission in Reykjavik, Iceland from June 28-30 2000 were presented by Gudni Gudnason, of the Icelandic Building Research Institute. Gudni Gudnason would host the meeting in 2000. The next workshop is entitled "International Conference on Construction Information Technology: Taking the Construction Industry into the 21st Century". The workshop would be a joint meeting between the W78 working commission and Working Commission 6 of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE) and of the European Group for Structural Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EG-SEA-AI). The timetable for the conference is s follows:
  

  November 1st 1999	- Submission of abstracts
  December 15th 1999	- Acceptance of abstracts
  March 15th 2000	- Submission of papers
  April 15th 2000	- Acceptance of papers

  Details of the conference can be found at: http://CIT2000.rabygg.is Enquiries regarding the conference should be addressed to Gudni Gudnason at: Gudni@rabygg.is

• 2001
  Arrangements for the meetings in 2001 and beyond were discussed. The opportunity to meet as part of the 2001 CIB World Congress in Wellington in April 2001 was raised. This Congress would have the main theme of Building Performance. The need for a local organiser who was primarily involved in the work, activities and research areas of the W78 Working Commission was raised and noted.

  Other opportunities were for the group to meet as part of a CIB workshop concerned with Safety in Construction in Hong Kong. The chance for a smaller and more specifically focussed W78 meeting in Aalborg in Denmark, or in South Africa, were also noted.

  The need for the arrangements for the 2001 meeting to be confirmed by the commission before the end of 1999 was raised.

Any Other Business

The encouragement to the working commission to look to publish work beyond the conference proceedings was noted. Possibilities included a "proceedings-plus" of further developments from a selection of papers included in the W78 1999 proceedings. Two difficulties were noted in this regard. The situation with regard to copyright and the difficulty in encouraging individuals to undertake the work involved without financial support.

A second proposal was for members of the working commission to prepare and publish "best practice" industry-oriented booklets from their work. This idea was seen to be an interesting and valuable proposition. Again, the difficulty of motivating members of the commission to do this without financial support was noted. It was also noted that a number of members of the commission were already undertaking such activities within their own employing organisations. Any member interested in pursuing either of these two new publishing opportunites was invited to contact the coordinator at m.betts@surveying.salford.ac.uk.

The meeting concluded with all expressing their thanks and appreciation to Dana Vanier of the NRC in Canada for his work in organising and hosting such a stimulating conference, and to Martin Fischer of Stanford and Thomas Froese of UBC in Vancouver for their input to the organisation.


Martin Betts June 14th 1999.