Appendix 10.1.1 Von: IMU Secretary An: [email protected]; CC: Betreff: IMU EC CL 05/07: vote on ICMI terms of reference change Datum: Mittwoch, 24. Januar 2007 11:42:40 Anlagen: To the IMU 2007-2010 Executive Committee Dear colleagues, We are currently experimenting with a groupware system that may help us organize the files that every EC member should know and improve the voting processes. Wolfgang Dalitz has checked the open source groupware systems and selected one that we want to try. It is more complicated than we thought and does have some deficiencies, but we see no freeware that is better. Here is our test run with a vote on a change of the ICMI terms of reference. To get to our voting system click on http://www.mathunion.org/ec-only/ To log in, you have to type your last name in the following version: ball, baouendi, deleon, groetschel, lovasz, ma, piene, procesi, vassiliev, viana Right now, everybody has the same password: pw123 You will immediately get to the summary page which contains an item "New Polls". The question to vote on is: Vote-070124: Change of ICMI terms of reference, #3, see Files->Voting->Vote- 070124 for full information and you are supposed to agree, disagree or abstain by clicking on the corresponding button. Full information about the contents of the vote is documented in the directory Voting (click on the +) where you will find a file Vote-070124.txt (click on the "txt icon" to see the contents of the file). The file is also enclosed below for your information. Once you have read this information you should be able to cast your vote. This is our trial run. If you have difficulties, please tell me what you do not understand. In case you feel that this is too complicated, please also let me know and cast your vote by e-mail to me. The advantage of the system we are going to set up is that we will have, in the future, a sound documentation of what we have done, voted on, which decisions were made, and so on. At present, the situation is relatively chaotic. The minutes, for instance, I sent to you last night have not been available to all EC members, and although they are termed final, I am not sure whether these are really the approved minutes or not. (Linda said these are the final versions.) The IMU office in the past was run by e-mail exchanges, often with no official final results reported, and it is hard to reconstruct in some cases what was decided how and what not. The poll today, the inconsistencies in the budget that I mentioned last night are results of that. We will also make mistakes in the future, but I hope with a document management system we will be able to keep the number of mistakes low. Please cast your vote! Best regards Martin FILE Vote-070124 ================ Vote on the change of Item 3 in the "ICMI Terms of Reference" The current ICMI Terms (2002) can be found at http://www.mathunion.org/Organization/ICMI/index.html The 2002 item 3 reads as follows: 3. The Executive Committee of the Commission consists of the following members. Elected by IMU: Nine members, including the four officers, namely, the President, two Vice-Presidents, and the Secretary-General. Ex-officio members: The outgoing President of ICMI, the President and the Secretary of IMU. Co-opted members: In order to provide for missing coverage or representation, the ICMI Executive Committee may co-opt up to two additional members. ICMI proposed the following change: 3. The Executive Committee of the Commission consists of the following members. (a) Elected by the ICMI General Assembly: Nine members, including the four officers, namely, the President, the two Vice-Presidents, and the Secretary-General. The President shall serve for one, non-renewable, term. (b) Ex-officio members: The immediate Past President of ICMI, the President and the Secretary of IMU. (c) Co-opted members: In order to provide for missing coverage or representation, the ICMI Executive Committee may co-opt up to two additional members. The (previous) EC did decide that it was not necessary for the GA to approve these changes, but the previous EC itself did not approve them either. The new EC, therefore, has to decide on these changes. Starting date of the poll: January 24, 2007 Closing date of the poll: February 7, 2004 Any vote not cast by the closing date will be assumed to be "I agree". Appendix 10.1.1 Von: IMU Secretary An: [email protected]; CC: Betreff: IMU EC CL 09/07: result of vote on ICMI terms of reference change, voting system Datum: Sonntag, 11. Februar 2007 11:44:20 Anlagen: To the IMU 2007-2010 Executive Committee Dear colleagues, This is a brief report on the EC vote on the change of ICMI terms of reference, see the circular letter "IMU EC CL 05/07: vote on ICMI terms of reference change" of January 24, 2007 - plus some questions on the new voting and groupware system. Five of the ten voting members of the EC (the past president has no voting right) have cast their vote before February 7, 2007, the closing date of the poll. All voted for the change. One EC member entered the voting page but did not cast his or her vote. Four members did not open the voting system at all. As I stated on the page describing the poll: " Any vote not cast by the closing date will be assumed to be "I agree"." I can now declare that the propsed change has been accepted by the EC and will inform ICMI about the result. On our voting and groupware system ================================== This was a test of the voting system, and I do not know whether I should call it successful or not. I would like to know your opinion about this way of handling formal EC matters. Further EC votes are comimg up, in particular about IMU membership and group changes. Shall we continue with this way of voting or should we give up? Some questions to those who did not vote: Was it too cumbersome to go to the voting page, was my description of the voting mechanism unclear, are there too many technicalities involved? Would you prefer to answer by e-mail? Please let me know! We are currently working on extensions of the groupware system. I do know that nobody wants to read technical instructions. So I will refrain from sending long e-mails describing what the system can do for the EC work. Instead, I am planning to give a "hands-on demonstration" at the EC meeting in Oslo, unless the EC decides to give up this project. Please recall how to enter the group ware system for the IMU EC. Go to http://www.mathunion.org/ec-only/ To log in, you have to type your last name in the following version: ball, baouendi, deleon, groetschel, lovasz, ma, piene, praeger, procesi, vassiliev, viana In the beginning we assigned the same password: pw123 to everybody. Use this, unless you have changed it (as I have done, for instance, by clicking on "settings" and following the instructions for password change). You may notice that we have added more material to this Web site such as all previous circular letters, the minutes of the EC meetings since 1991, further Reports on GAs, budgets and IMU officers - all material I obtained from Suely Lima who worked for Jacob Palis during his term as IMU Secretary. Best regards Martin +-------------------------------------------+ | Martin Groetschel | | Secretary of the | | International Mathematical Union (IMU) | | URL: http://www.mathunion.org | | e-mail: [email protected] | +-------------------------------------------+ |Postal Address: |Telecommunication: | |Zuse Institute Berlin|Tel: +49 30 84185 210| |Takustr. 7 |Tel: +49 30 314 23266| |D-14195 Berlin |FAX: +49 30 84185 269| |Germany |Sec: +49 30 84185 208| +-------------------------------------------+ | personal URL: www.zib.de/groetschel | +-------------------------------------------+ Appendix 4.4.1 / 10.3.1 The International Commission on Mathematical Instruction What? Why? For Whom? Hyman Bass and Bernard R. Hodgson Mathematics is an international—even universal— Our focus here is the International Commission discipline, and this aspect finds institutional ex- on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI), the mathe- pression every four years in the International Con- matics education counterpart to the IMU. gress of Mathematicians (ICM), where a world community of mathematicians assembles to re- A Brief Bio of the ICMI port progress on shared problems and with a com- The International Commission on Mathematical mon technical language. But these things, which we Instruction2 was founded at the fourth ICM held in now take for granted, were not always so. The “in- Rome in 1908.3 It was initiated to support a then ternational movement” in mathematics took hold widespread interest among mathematicians in only at the end of the nineteenth century, the first school education. The Rome Congress adopted a res- congress being the 1897 ICM in Zürich. The body olution, submitted on the initiative of the American that now provides the international infrastructure mathematician, teacher-educator, and historian of for mathematics—for example, sponsoring the mathematics David Eugene Smith (1860–1944), cre- ICM’s—is the International Mathematical Union ating an international commission with the initial (IMU),1 an international nongovernmental and non- mandate of making “a comparative study on the profit scientific organization with the purpose of methods and plans of teaching mathematics at sec- promoting international cooperation in mathe- ondary schools” (quoted in [5, p. 13]). The idea of matics.