In my President’s Letter this April, I gave an account of our ExCo-SSA and ExCo-LATAM Meetings. Now that we have completed our latest round of meetings with all Regional Chapters, let me give a brief account of our meetings with WANA and WAP.
The two meetings happened on May 28 and June 18 respectively, and both meetings were expanded to include non-ExCo colleagues. Many new ideas have come out of these meetings, including WANA launching a membership drive before our Seoul Conference, WAP starting to promote its 2025 Tokyo Conference, and both Chapters setting up booths and/or membership corners in Seoul to attract members.
WANA is a young Chapter recently reconstituted, it is setting plans to run webinars and hopefully a regional conference in a year or two. Its leadership is learning fast from other Chapters, and practically all Council colleagues attending the meeting have offered to help. Arising from this meeting, a bulkmail has been sent to all WAPOR members on June 17 to promote the Chapter. In that bulkmail, we see keywords like “political reforms”, “social and cultural changes”, “conflicts and security”, “national identity”, “educational reform”, “environmental sustainability”, “gender equality” and so on, together with geographical terms like “Middle East”, “Gulf States”, “MENA” and “WANA”. There is little doubt that any study of or for humanity cannot neglect our WANA Chapter.
Our WAP Chapter, on the other hand, is much more matured and active. It is already creating history by co-organizing our first ever Joint Global-Chapter WAPOR Conference. “Joint” in the sense of total integration and collaboration, not just running events back-to-back. There are many big challenges like setting a uniform conference registration fee riding on different membership fees, coordinating local and global sponsorships, organizing joint banquets and business meetings, and full integration of participation and presentations. These challenges can only be overcome when there is complete trust among all organizers, and I am glad to say that this has been the case. I am sure that our Seoul Conference will become a model operation for future global-regional joint conferences […].
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