The two key events that OCIS organised in 2005-2006 were two professional development workshops catering specifically to internationally-minded members. The first workshop was organised as a Paper Development Workshop. We selected good papers written by international authors or written about international topics from those that were not quite good enough to make the final cut of papers accepted for regular sessions.

We invited the authors of those papers to attend a special, by-invitation-only workshop and paired the attending authors with mentors - one mentor per paper. The mentors had the job of providing a critical appraisal of the paper and suggesting how it could be improved, ideally such that the author would be more likely to have a paper accepted in the regular division paper sessions the following year. Seven author teams accepted our nominations, representing the following countries: China, Lithuania, New Zealand, Taiwan, Turkey, USA. Seven mentors accepted our request, representing the following countries: France, China, Singapore, USA. Feedback from both mentors and authors indicated that this workshop was a great success and the suggestion was made both that it run in future years and that it, or something similar, be included in the Doctoral Consortium The second event organised by OCIS was an international networking PDW. This was designed to help internationally-minded OCIS members to get to know one another, to discuss internationally-relevant topics, and ideally to form author teams to work on international papers for submission to next year's meetings.

The PDW was supported by a panel of speakers who gave provocative opening remarks as a way of stimulating further discussion. These speakers hailed from: China, The Netherlands, USA. This second PDW followed straight after the Paper Development PDW mentioned above, and some off those in the first moved on to the second. However, arguably an insufficient number of people attended the second session for it to achieve its objective of driving a discussion about internationally relevant topics, as well as enabling the formation of international author teams. Nevertheless, those who participated indicated that it had been a valuable experience. 

Both of the above two workshops were highlighted in the OCIS newsletter (April 7^th, 2006) at: http://ocis.aomonline.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=125&Itemid=43.

 The International Representative-at-Large also wrote a short op-ed piece for the OCIS newsletter (dated January 2^nd, 2006) titled “Internationalising the Academy: Do We Really Want to?”. This was a deliberately provocative article that was intended to start debate that would be relevant to the PDWs that followed seven months later. The article is available here:  http://ocis.aomonline.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=26
 

Robert Davison, International Representative-at-Large
City University of Hong Kong
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