Saturday 6 October 2012

BCS President’s Report September 2012


I hope you all enjoyed the summer break. September started with a Council meeting in London on the 6th. You will be pleased to know that the Society’s finances are sound and the membership is up again. We are looking at ways of reducing the overall costs of producing Maplines and we’ve decided to delay the re-branding process until 2014 but we will be updating the marketing material to reflect our 50th Anniversary next year. The 2013 programme is coming together and there will be some exceptional events.
Summer Maplines
I hope you’ve all had the summer edition of Maplines by now – another excellent effort by the Maplines team. The cut-off date for articles for the winter edition is 16 October so please get those articles to the editors as soon as you can.

We had a stand at the recent AGI conference in Nottingham and our thanks go to our hosts the AGI and to Hugo Boylan and David Cooper who helped to man the stand. I think we should get a few more members following this event. The schools Restless Earth team have just got back from 2 days in Penarth. We did 2 sessions on the Wednesday and 2 on Thursday which meant that over 200 students took part in the exercise. We’ve been invited back next year so the staff and students must have been pleased. This time we had help from RGS ambassadors and students from the University of Glamorgan for which we are very grateful.

There is a GIS SIG meeting on 24 October which is being held at the British Computer Society offices, which are just off the Strand, and entitled, 'Experiences of working with commercial and open source data and software'. It promises to be a really useful and informative afternoon so do come and join us. Details, of course, are on the BCS website.  
On 26 October there is another schools Restless Earth Workshop this time in Sandhurst. The final event in October is our AGM, Lecture and dinner in the RAF Club on the 31st, again details are on the website and Roger Hore will be sending out the paperwork shortly.

And lastly, if you heard the short piece I did with Eddie Mair on the Radio 4 pm programme you may have gathered that I had to use the atlas index to establish the precise location of Uttoxeter – my apologies to any members who live there!
And if you are short of ideas for a Christmas, well membership of BCS might be appreciated?
Best Wishes

Peter Jolly
President of The British Cartographic Society

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