1. Short visit of the ICA Secretary General in Budapest The In 20 March 2006, Ferjan Ormeling, the Secretary General of the ICA visited Budapest to discuss the future activities of the commission.

The International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) Commission 2, Commission 3 and Commission 7; the College of Geoinformatics, University of West Hungary; the Hungarian Society of Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, are jointly organised the Workshop on e-Governance, Knowledge Management and e-Learning in Budapest.
The CET represented itself with a presentation: Zentai-Fraser: ICA CET Activities: Development of the ICA-sponsored Internet Cartography Teaching Programme. The presentation was published in a proceedings.
See more information on http://www.fig.hu/fig.htm

The Working Group on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage was formed by the ICA Executive Committee. The ICA standing commissions may encourage the activities of WGs, so this was the reason, that the CET chairman represented the commission on the workshop.
See http://web.auth.gr/xeee/ICA-Heritage/Workshop/Workshop.htm for more details.



4. Wolfgang Meissner withdrawal

The co-vice chairman of the period 2003-2007 retired from his position.
"I think it is time to announce my getting out of the Commission Education and Training.

• What I can contribute to the project "web course" - as we started in Durban in 2003 - is the essential part of the German project called "Ausbildungsleitfaden - focus". An attempt to translate a single module into English was made with David's help in 1998/1999 and has been in form of PDF-file with "Map design: Graphic design basics" in Beijing since 2001.
• Unfortunately, I need to accept that you do not think it is valuable to continue with that project.
• Since 2004 I have been retired. Therefore, a distance to the current events in cartography spread which is becoming bigger every year. This is a huge disadvantage regarding the subject Education and Training.
• I also have to gain the impression that there is still no conclusive concept built in order to produce and develop our project "Internet Cartography Teaching Courses". Besides, there are many questions to be answered and it is hard for me to believe in an implementation.
• In Durban 2003 I have already declared that I will not be in office longer than the next election in Moscow in 2007. Unfortunately, there will be no member meeting in Berlin to develop our concept. That is the reason why I now withdraw sceptically.
  
  Good Luck for the further work in the Commission Education and Training.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang MEISSNER"

Our answer:

Dear Wolfgang,

Thanks for your email. We can understand your frustrations and the need to move on.
Viewed in isolation the BSc project has taken a long time to get to where it is. There are so many competing areas of professional life that it is
difficulty to progress ever project at the speed we would like. We are pleased we have been able to achieve a web presence for the listing of cartography courses worldwide but realise that this was a lot more straightforward than creating an actual web course.
We are frustrated that we have not been able to commit as much time as is needed to the BSc course.
Perhaps, like you, we will get to the point where I believe that the project aim will never be realised, but until that time we will keep working at it and dreaming of that time. Rest assured that your "Map Design" design module will be included. The difficulty wesee is getting the right structure/framework for the course which can incorporate such modules. We hope that the document we sent for comment some months ago actually provides that structure.
We certainly hope that there will be quite a bit of discussion about the project in Berlin.
We are sorry we will not see you at InterCarto12 but perhaps your words of frustration will spur us to do a better job at coordinating the BSc project, otherwise it is clear that weshould hand the task to someone else.
Thank you for your contribution over many years and expecially for your friendship.
We wish you a long and happy retirement.


5. CET annual meeting on InterCarto InterGIS 12 in Berlin

The annual meeting of the Commission was organized as the part of InterCarto InterGIS 12. The conference brought together 72 individuals from Germany, Russia, Hungary, Australia, Poland, Romania, Canada, Spain, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Pakistan, Belgium, Tanzania, Austria, Zambia, Serbia, Netherlands. The ICA Commission on Education and Training was represented by László Zentai, Rufino Gomez and David Fraser who each presented papers. The Commission meeting was productive with one of the ICA vice-Presidents', Vladimir Tikunov contributing to our discussions. The report from CET chairman, Laszlo Zentai concentrated on the positive outcomes we have achieved in the last two years and vice-President Tikunov congratulated the Commission members for the work that is being done at the international level to promote cartographic education and training. The web pages for the commission provide a significant amount of information relating to the Commission. The listing of cartographic courses is now completed and most countries have a presence. The concept of the on-line Bachelor of Science provided through the ICA has taken a number of changes in direction. It was decided at the meeting to create a structure into which the existing teaching modules can be access by individuals wanting to undertake professional development activities. Once the modules are in place work will begin on creating a set of standard assessment tasks which will the way forward in individuals qualifying for different levels of certification.
Members are encouraged to offer their services to assist with the activities of the Commission so that we can report on a number of successful outcomes at the ICA conference in Moscow in 2007.

See http://www.icc2007.com/, deadline for submission of abstracts: December 15, 2006.
See the topics and the abstract submission form on the ICC2007 website.

We plan to organize a joint meeting in Moscow before the ICC 2007. We inform you about the details as soon as the venue and date are fixed.

7. Mailing list

I set up a mailing list to make the information distribution much easier.
You can send a message to cet@lazarus.elte.hu and your message will be sent to each "subscriber". All members are subscribers, but you can unsubscribe automatically if you want.
It is allowed to send attachment to the list, but the size limit is 150 kB (practically your attachment cannot be larger then circa 100 kB).
The messages are automatically archieved (depending on the actual network speed the sent message may appear in the archive in some seconds). The archieve is available here: lazarus.elte.hu/lists/