Proposing a New Election Procedure for ICMI

The delegates at the 2002 General Assembly (GA) of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) held in Shanghai, China, passed Resolution 8, which states:

The General Assembly of IMU expects the Executive Committee to develop a proposed mechanism to involve members from the National Committees for Mathematics, not on the Executive Committee, to assist in the selection of slates. This proposal should be put forth to the 2006 General Assembly.

In response to this resolution, the Executive Committees (EC) of IMU and ICMI have drafted a Nominating Committee Model for the election of the ICMI EC that awaits approval by the 15th IMU GA to be held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in August 2006. The essential features of the proposed new ICMI election procedures are the following:

• The ICMI Nominating Committee (NC) proposes a slate of candidates for the officers and other EC members of ICMI. This NC is formed according to a carefully crafted process that assures that it is largely independent of the incumbent EC’s of both IMU and ICMI, and that it includes members who are knowledgeable about the culture and functioning of ICMI.
• The election of officers and other EC members of ICMI is at and by the GA of ICMI (not IMU) at the ICME (not the ICM).

This new process will be tested for the selection process of the slate to be presented to the delegates at the IMU 2006 General Assembly. The 2006 ICMI Nominating Committee will thus be operating informally as an advisory body to the IMU EC, so that the experience gained can be incorporated into a formal proposal for a change in the Statutes at the IMU 2006 GA. The Chair of the 2006 Nominating Committee of ICMI is Mogens Niss (mn@mmf.ruc.dk), Roskilde University, Denmark, a former Secretary-General of ICMI.

Since the terms of ICMI EC members are for four years (between congresses), and the ICME’s are two years out of phase with the ICM’s, it was necessary to design a transition phase for moving from the current system to the new one. In particular, a new ICMI EC will be elected by the IMU GA in 2006, but the next such election will be at and by the ICMI GA at ICME-11 in Monterrey, in 2008. To accommodate this transition, the terms of the next two ICMI EC’s will be for three years each (2007-2009 and 2010-2012), instead of four. Assuming that this new process is approved in Santiago de Compostela, it will be fully functioning in steady state at ICME-12, in 2012 (for the election of the 2013-2016 ICMI EC).