The 122nd meeting of the CIB Board at the start of March marked the halfway point in this CIB triennium. 19 Board members attended.
The President Keith Hampson of Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre (SBEnrc), Australia, called for a focus on his four Presidential priorities, namely:
1) An effective CIB member service team,
2) High quality, globally collaborative research,
3) Building membership, and
4) World Building Congress 2022.
Key matters discussed included:
- A new Priority Theme Area on the impact and implications of Covid-19 to be led by Göran Lindahl of Chalmers University of Technology was initiated.
- A new CIB Task Group on Timber was approved.
- World Building Congress 2022. The Call for Abstracts has been issued, over 20 sessions are so far planned and 23 Partner Journals have offered WBC 2022 Special Issues. The planning is still focused on a face-to-face conference with a hybrid option for some online participation which could be adapted to a full online event if the global pandemic repercussions continued to impact delegates’ ability to travel to attend. The Board also held a workshop session to further develop the programme of the event, including keynote speakers and 4-6 special plenary sessions.
- GLOBE Consensus. The Board was pleased to receive a presentation from the lead author of this Consensus, Professor Michael Havbro Faber of Aalborg University, Denmark, and to approve work on a new Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate to implement its recommendations.
- Summary business plan 2021-2022. This high-level overview of all our activities was welcomed as a useful summary to help the Board and CEO manage the work programme, and it was agreed to publish this on the website shortly so that members can be appraised of the Board’s strategy.
Other business conducted over three 2-hour sessions included:
- Student Chapters funding and Awards 2021. The competitions for the Gyula Sebestyén Award and our collaborative funding opportunity have both been launched with closing dates of end March and end April respectively.
- Early Career Researchers. The first online events for this new global network of members’ researchers in the first five years of their career have been very successful with nearly 100 participants to date.
- Four new Commission Coordinators were confirmed:
- Dr Mark Shelbourn – W089, Education in the Built Environment
- Prof Abimbola Windapo – TG81, Global Construction Data
- Dr Yingbin Feng – W065, Organisation and Management of Construction
- Dr Ellyn Lester – W102, Information and Knowledge Management in Building.
- Partner Journals. The new strategy to develop mutually beneficial collaborative relationships with our 3 Recognised and 26 Encouraged journals was approved.
- Third-party funding strategy. Good progress was reported with strategies aimed at potential beneficiaries of CÍB’s expert global network in Canada and charitable Foundations and UN agencies under the leadership of CIB Vice President Mark Hastak of Purdue University, USA.
- Remaining Board meetings in 2021. With regret the Board decided that its meetings in June and October, scheduled respectively for Purdue University in the USA and the Shanghai Research Institute of Building Sciences in the People’s Republic of China, would be held as online meetings due to on-going travel restrictions.
We thank all the Board members for their leadership and hard work in driving forward the above strategies and activities.
Don Ward, CEO
23 March 2021
