Letter from WAPOR President (May 2024)

Note: This document was translated from English into many different languages. In case of any discrepancy or inconsistency between the English version and any other translation, the English version shall always prevail.

Exactly two months ahead of our WAPOR 77th and WAPOR Asia Pacific 7th Joint Annual Conference, I wrote this letter with a loud call: Please contribute as much as you can to our discussion on Humanity in Seoul!

I am sure all members are aware of the main theme of our Seoul Conference: “The Soul of Public Opinion Research: Liberty, Quality and Humanity”. I am glad to report that at the time of my writing, 351 paper, panel, and poster submissions have been accepted by the Conference, 240 individuals have registered for the Conference, and 20 organizations are supporting this year’s conference as sponsors or co-hosts. The numbers keep growing.

Broken down by geographic areas, roughly one-quarter of our presentation authors comes from Korea the host country, another one-quarter comes from the remaining part of the Asia Pacific and Central Asia Region, while the remaining half comes from the rest of the world. This seems to be a perfect balance between WAPOR Global and Regional in terms of participation, and one success of our Joint Conference has already been achieved!

While our Conference Committee is working hard to draw up the preliminary program of the Conference, let me take this opportunity to break the news that there will be three keynote sessions corresponding to the three core values mentioned in the conference theme:

• On Liberty: Kathy Frankovic, Defending Polling: Why It Is Necessary and How We Can Protect Poll Freedom.
• On Quality: Tom Smith, Maintaining Data Quality amid Measurement Disruptions.
• On Humanity: Robert Chung (myself) to moderate a Keynote Roundtable Discussion.

While the list of Roundtable Speakers will be announced together with the draft program, I am trying to expand the scope and impact of the discussion in the following ways:

• I am calling for donations of short video clips and e-posters from WAPOR members and friends, on the topic of “Humanity and Public Opinion”, by means of an online survey which anyone can participate by clicking here.
• These clips and posters will very likely be shown in the Humanity Booth to be set up in the conference venue, quoted or discussed in the Keynote Roundtable on Humanity, and uploaded onto our WAPOR website (probably in our online archive) for public reference.

For more details of the collection method, please click here. To start with, “Humanity” can be broadly defined as “all people in the world as a whole [and] understanding and kindness towards other people…” (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/humanity) In the domain of public opinion research, I would construe “Liberty” to be the right to conduct and publish scientific research to let people’s voice be heard, while “Quality” is the application of scientific methods and professional standards to all such research. “Humanity” gives us the purpose for protecting these rights to conduct and publish quality studies. It reminds us of the importance of applying our knowledge to mitigate conflicts and disasters, in order to promote the common good of humankind.

When donating these videos and e-posters, please bear in mind how relevant they are in addressing these questions:

• Conceptually and practically, how are public opinion and humanity connected?
• How is your public opinion research related to humanity?
• How your research has helped, or will help, to mitigate national, regional or cultural conflicts?
• How your research has helped, or will help, to address global problems?
• How public opinion research or statistics has been, or can be, used in performing arts, literature studies, and other humanities?

The list is not meant to be comprehensive, the following websites may provide more inspirations: https://sdgs.un.org/goals and https://unfoundation.org/what-we-do/issues/. For practical needs, we have set June 14, 2024 to be the deadline for anyone to express interest in donating these videos and e-posters, and July 12 to be the deadline for final submission. Please make a submission yourself or pass this online survey link to your friends.

At this juncture, I would like to thank my colleagues in the leadership for supporting this idea, and our Secretariat for taking on the extra workload. Fortunately, starting from June, we will have one extra pair of hands in our Secretariat. First time in WAPOR’s history, we have employed an Information Technology and Administrative Assistant (ITAA) to support the work of our Executive Director Kseniya Kizilova. She is Isabela Rocha, a doctorate candidate at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Brasília (IPOL UnB) with an MSc in Political Science. She is a techno-enthusiast and will help us enhance our digital infrastructure to facilitate seamless communication and coordination.

While our Secretariat is working very hard to prepare for our Seoul Conference, there are many more events in the build-up process and I would like to report three of them to members, namely, Meetings with Regional Chapters, National Representatives and our Policy Forum.

In my last President’s Letter, I reported briefly on our ExCo-SSA and ExCo-LATAM Meetings, and the Presidents of the two Chapters had also shared their conference experience in my Letter. At the time of writing this Letter, our meeting with WANA was completed not long ago, so I will wait for another occasion to report it.

On May 23, under the capable chairmanship of our Vice President and President-Elect David Jodice, we had a very productive online meeting of National Representatives. A record number of 61 Representatives plus 6 other colleagues attended, and many important issues were raised and discussed. Questions about organizational membership, sharing of membership contacts, promotion of WAPOR to new members, collation of educational resources, and so on, were discussed and many useful suggestions were made. I personally enjoyed the discussion very much, and I hope many of the suggestions made would be implemented by the time we meet in Seoul.

There is, however, one more important meeting before Seoul, and this is a new attempt to enhance our communication. At the beginning of this year, I proposed to hold a Policy Forum in June so that we can warm up ourselves with ideas before holding our Annual Conference. The idea has evolved into holding a Forum with Council Members, plus Committee Members, plus Chapter Leaders, plus input from members. Our Secretariat will soon send a bulkmail to members inviting them to contribute their ideas and thoughts on questions like: What should be the vectors of WAPOR’s future development? Which activities should WAPOR prioritize in 2025-2030? How can we further boost our membership? What kinds of cooperation and partnerships should we seek? How can our Secretariat support our Chapters better? How can WAPOR Committees work together better? and so on. These ideas will be collated by the Secretariat and discussed freely in the Policy Forum. Because of these additional works, the Forum will be rescheduled to late June or early July, depending on participants’ availability.

Please, therefore, send in your ideas for discussion in our Policy Forum when you receive our bulkmail. Please contribute a short video or an e-poster on Humanity whether or not you are going to Seoul. If you indeed will go, please register at https://2024-wapor-conference.events.wapor.org/ as early as possible so that our local organizers can plan everything better. For those making presentations, please consider nominating yourself for the different conference paper awards at https://wapor.org/events/annual-conference/current-conference/available-paper-awards/.

Humbly yours,

Robert Chung

WAPOR President