Letter from WAPOR President (June 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.

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.

After this round of meetings with our Regional Chapters, our next important event is the Policy Forum now scheduled to be held online on July 2. All Council and Committee Members, together with Chapter Leaders, have been invited to attend. On June 21, our Secretariat sent a bulkmail to all members captioned “WAPOR 2030 Agenda Survey” to solicit “feedback, thoughts and ideas on the current accomplishments of WAPOR, recommendations for improvements as well as ideas and suggestions for new initiatives”. The bulkmail explains, “One important foundation of our Association’s activity is communication. Now that so much work has been done, important questions arise: What should be the vectors of the Association’s future development? Which activities should WAPOR prioritize in 2025-2030? How can we further boost our membership? Which cooperation and partnerships should we seek? How can WAPOR support our regional chapters and help them grow? How can WAPOR Committees work together to achieve their development plans?”

At the time of writing this Letter, several submissions have been received with divergent views, which is a wonderful development. On reaching out to the world, for example, one member suggested not having any Regional Chapter at all, while another member suggested us to establish more, and in particular, a European Chapter. Another member even went further to suggest appointing more sub-national representatives for different language or cultural areas within one country. On WAPOR development, some suggested proactively reaching out to universities and journalists (perhaps using our “Friends of WAPOR Scheme”), publishing surveys of global issues annually, offering bargain rates for first year membership, and so on. These are very useful and important suggestions, I encourage all of you to tell us more by filling in the e-form at https://forms.gle/i4uzojyJjTpPz3BU7 whether you will attend the Forum or not. Just in case we cannot tackle all the suggestions in the Policy Forum, we will bring them forward to our Seoul Conference, for further discussion in our Council, Committee and/or Business Meetings.

Our Annual Conference is just about one month away, a draft program is now available at our WAPOR website at https://wapor.org/events/annual-conference/current-conference/schedule/. Between now and then, somewhat different from previous years, all members and friends can make the best out of the conference by doing these:

• Participants familiarize yourself with the topics of this year’s panels and presentations by clicking around the draft program;
• Speakers and presenters are encouraged by our Conference Committee to submit their papers or presentations to our Secretariat ahead of time, for uploading to our online WAPOR Archive at https://wapor.org/resources/wapor-archive/ for reference by fellow participants as well as those not able to make it to Seoul.

Our preliminary conference program now features more than 60 panels with paper presentations, plus several dozen posters and training workshops. We will have one plenary keynote on each of the three core values of WAPOR, namely, Liberty, Quality and Humanity. Conference registration is well under way, and all presenters are asked to register before July 5 otherwise their presentations will be dropped from the final program. For more information about registration, please see https://wapor.org/events/annual-conference/current-conference/registration/. If you encounter any difficulties with registration, please contact our WAPOR Secretariat at admin@wapor.org.

While I really hope to see all of you in Seoul, I do appreciate that some of you, including committee members, national representatives, co-authors, co-presenters and so on, may not be able to make it for one reason or another. With the support of the Conference Committee and our Secretariat, there is now one more channel for virtual participation free of charge. Riding on the collection of videos and e-posters for presentation at our Keynote Roundtable on Humanity, we now extend this video collection exercise to all WAPOR members and friends, whether you will go to Seoul or not. If you want to say a few words about yourself, your work, your organization and their relevancy to humankind and humanity, you can either (a) submit your short video or automated slideshow by clicking on https://forms.gle/nbcjSPBpThPGzv3y6, or (b) contact our WAPOR Secretariat at admin@wapor.org and we will help you to record your video message in a Zoom interview. All videos and e-posters in the form of automated slideshows may be quoted or discussed in the Keynote Roundtable on Humanity, will certainly be played in our Humanity Booth in the conference, and/or quoted or discussed in any parallel session of the conference, and/or uploaded onto our WAPOR websites any time in any form, especially our online WAPOR Archive, for public reference. Please note that opt-in consent is implied when you make these submissions.

I hope you appreciate these “out of the box” (actually “out of usual conferences”) arrangements. We may or may not repeat them in the future, simply because we will dance with time and our trajectory may change directions to follow the curvature of humankind progress. Moreover, Seoul is Seoul. It is no doubt one important stop in our soul-searching exercise, but it is by no means a full stop. Our new leadership will be brewing soon after Seoul, then lead us to new heights. If you want to be part of it, come to Seoul (https://wapor.org/events/annual-conference/current-conference/)! See you soon!

Humbly yours,

Robert Chung

WAPOR President