INFORMS 1.5

6 March 2009 by Sanjay Saigal.

The primary professional society for advanced analytics – INFORMS – has a distinguished history and an impressive membership. But like most volunteer-driven groups, INFORMS operates on the basis of consensus and professional fellowship. It is emphatically not an opportunity-driven enterprise akin to a private company or even a lobbying-savvy professional group such as the American Medical Association.

This sort of self-branding – as an agency for the advancement of a specialized kind of knowledge rather than as a guild devoted to nurturing and expanding professional hegemony – affects both the operation of INFORMS and the development of the profession. An interesting manifestation of this phenomenon is the slow adoption of information technology by INFORMS. Things are, however, improving: As of today, INFORMS boasts an official blog!

This official blog doesn’t quite get us to INFORMS 2.0; it’s still one-way communication. The society has supported blogging at previous national-level meetings through the efforts of individual INFORMS Computing Society (ICS) members (see here). And the very nifty eNews Daily, which debuted at last year’s Washington, DC meeting, looks to me like a keeper.

I anticipate that these efforts will take a more definite form over time, to the point that non-attendee members (as well as the interested public) can feel connected to events as they occur. The nominal goal, of course, is to increase the dispersion and penetration of the profession’s message. But more interestingly, proliferating Web 2.0 technologies should increase the engagement of INFORMS members in the society’s affairs and the attractiveness of its scheduled events.

A milestone of the development of Web 2.0 ideas within INFORMS should appear in late April, from the 2009 Practice Meeting in Phoenix, AZ. The Marketing folks at the society are mulling over what should and could be done. Let them know! Are you planning to attend? If so, does the prospect of (you) blogging from the meeting grab you? Does it seem like unnecessary work when you’d rather be schmoozing with grad school friends? Does it raise the question, “would anyone want to read my impressions?”

And if you are not planning to attend, what might most make you keenly regret your decision not to? Would blogposts help you better stay in touch with goings-on at the meeting? Or is something like the aforementioned eNews Daily already too much information? Or perhaps, going for a diametrically opposed extreme point, do you wish someone would set up an INFORMS Twitter feed?

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