A European study has concluded that in the background of a rapidly changing landscape, mainly as a result of globalisation and the increasingly clear need for deep and consistent multidisciplinary approaches in the ICT area, there is a need of immediate action to bring European professional and research societies together, help them interact, join forces, overcome fragmentation, increase the clarity and reach of their voice.

The report, ‘Role and Impact of Professional and Scientific Societies in ICT Research, Education and Innovation’ summarises the results of the SMART study, carried out under the mandate to investigate the current situation and the dynamics of the ICT societies in Europe and to recommend strategies that may help overcome ICT society fragmentation, increasingly seen as a major bottleneck to their future development.

The study compiled a significant inventory of the EU societies, while also surveying them and consulting with them as regards many aspects of their day-to-day activities, plans and aspirations.

The inventory, including 442 societies across the EU has been now published in the public domain (www.ictsocieties.org).

The directory includes four Maltese societies, namely the British Computer Society Malta Chapter, the Computer Society of Malta, the IEEE Malta Section, and the ISACA Malta Chapter. A number of potential lines for action have been proposed and evaluated, qualitatively as well as by means of quantitative benchmarks.

First of all, a novel, virtual, environment is proposed for, step by step, design and development, as to allow the ICT societies or individual ICT professionals to meet, to self govern and to co-ordinate their research or other ICT related efforts. The benefit would be obvious, and the virtual environment would act as a meeting place and, then, as an enabler of cooperation. Secondly, triggering the strategy and putting it into effect would require the consensus and participation of representatives of the five to six key EU ICT societies (as identified in the report), possibly represented by means of an advisory board.

Milestones on this path would be the promotion of the strategy among the ICT community and its refinement through this communication, the definition of administrative issues, especially securing transparency and self-governance and the setup of a powerful technology collaborative platform. Further, highly critical strategic actions could then be launched, as soon as the above milestones have been reached. These actions would include the setting-up of a think tank in the EU; a high-level intra-science communication board; actions to establish a strong global presence of the European ICT sector (marketing focus); and actions to develop new EU wide, knowledge and communication intensive, services for the use of ICT professionals (horizontal view, internal services).

At the very short term, it is necessary to keep the interest high.

A proposed short term targeted action would be to transform the developed inventory into a dynamic and self-maintainable resource that would mobilise the community and also convey a feeling that things are moving, with a minimal cost it would allow leverage of the interaction and secure participation in the specification phase of thetwo tiers (technology, administration) of the proposed strategy.