In 2008, our then EMC Society president, Elya Joffe, strongly advocated for an increasingly global perspective on the role of the EMC Society pointing to the significance of Thomas Friedman’s idea of an increasingly “flat world”. With the second consecutive EMC Society president, Francesca Maradei, being from outside the US, a continued emphasis on maintaining a worldwide view is reflected in her message from the Winter 2010 issue of the EMC Newsletter. She particularly highlighted the need to “extend and strengthen our perception as a global Society.” EMC is one of those activities that are truly “global” in impact as systems developed in one part of the world must operate in other parts of the globe with a minimum of interruption or disruption of electronic systems.
     In November 2009, I began serving as the Sister Society Coordinator for the EMC Society and would like to share my vision of what Sister Society Agreements between the EMC Society and other technical societies can do for its membership.
     The Sister Societies Committee has a vision to increase cooperation and awareness of global EMC issues that are essential to the continued development of safe and reliable electronic systems and devices, to increase the participation of individual members of the IEEE EMC Society with global partners, and to facilitate the growth and support of emerging and expanding technologies.
     The IEEE has suggested possible collaboration in the areas of membership, publications, technical meetings, and various joint activities. These can be defined in terms of mutual and periodic promotion of membership, technical meetings, publications, the exchange of access privileges to mailing lists, and mutual web site linkages. In the area of publications, Sister Society Agreements will promote the exchange of on-line information access privileges, co-sponsorship of publications available on-line and in printed technical journals and magazines, and discounted subscriptions. Technical meetings will benefit from co-sponsorship of conferences, symposia and workshops, and the mutual granting of registration discounts. In addition, other partnerships in technical, educational, humanitarian and other areas shall be investigated.
     A partnership web page will be used to insure information dissemination for the benefit of the memberships of both societies. The page will contain all relevant records and reports of all collaborative events, announcements, messages, and calls for papers. Additionally, the page will contain liaison/contact information and the agreement tracking mechanisms that indicates major agreement items and states their implementation status and will be visible from both societies’ web sites.
     A memorandum of understanding template has been approved by the EMC Society Board of Directors. The chief target is reaching outside the US to IEEE and non-IEEE EMC entities, particularly in India, Japan and China. If you are aware of relationships that should be considered by the Sister Society Coordinator, please contact the coordinator, Chuck Bunting, at reverb@okstate.edu.                                                                                                                                                                                                                       EMC