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Letter from the Coordinator
February 11, 2001

    Dear Sit Fellow,
   This letter is intended to be a review of how things are going for SiT these days – and I think you will all agree that we have reason to be proud of the development of our organisation!
    First of all, we have received a record-number of applications for this year’s meeting in Prague, ca. 65 in all (depending on how you count). Of course, this meant that we also had to make selections, a difficult process to say the least! (It will also mean that those of you who like to spontaneously show up at the last minute will not be able to find space, sorry.) But it is also a sign of respect for our group and for the conference organizers specifically. It shows that our work is gaining a good reputation, and this could influence funders...
    We solved the agonizing problems around selection by accepting 45 people altogether, 9 more than planned (even though we want to limit the meeting to 40 participants in the end.) This meant that all SiT members who had sent in the requested paper by the due-date could be accepted, along with very exciting new people from Poland, Romania (after Alina Marin and all our other Romanian friends seem to have dropped out....), Chechnia, (East-)Germany, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Austria. Unfortunately, we still don’t have anyone from Sarajevo, Albania, or Kosovo – except for an international person who teaches history of ethnic conflicts in Pristina.

Creative Board discussions...

    The very fact that we did have to put some of our members on the waiting-list brings up the question of how else can SiT members work together if not at the IWM? (=International Working Meeting). The Board discussed 3 possibilities:

We could have a larger SiT conference every few years. The big question is: How could we organize it to keep SiT’s specialness??

If you are interested in working on this question, please join the ‘Big-SiT Task-force’ by contacting me.

You could organize a SiT workshop in your area, like the program of lectures and workshops we presented at the university anniversary in Brno, or like the work Jancis has been doing in Russia and would like to do more.

(A variation of the workshop idea would be to invite the Board to meet in your city for the fall meeting next year. This would involve recommending a cheap hotel and organizing an evening dinner-meeting with interested others from your area. If you are thinking of having an IWM in your area in the next few years, this could be a way of ‘testing the water’.)**

The third suggestion might be more appropriate for frustrated new SiT interessees: they can come to the Summer-School course at the IUC in Dubrovnik, Aug. 27-31, where Olga, Alexander, Jancis, Jadranka and I will be talking about transitional psychology. This could be a good way to catch up with 10 years of SiT history in a vacation setting.
Jancis and I have thought up a 4^th possibility: should the Reader go to all members? Please speak your mind! Would you like to have it??

Prague team proved to be very efficient.

Other dimensions that include both those participating this year and those who will not be present are outlined in the suggested Structure of SiT, which you will receive with this Newsletter. As you will notice, it includes plans for everyone to vote for the 2 new Board members (to replace Jadranka and Wolfgang, who get a year’s holiday after serving their terms). It also asks everyone to pay dues = one hour’s earnings, either at the IWM or to be sent with the local coordinator (since the bank fees for a check or a transfer could be higher than the earnings).

This Structure of SiT has come out of over a year of discussion in the last and present Boards, with the help of a structure-committee which met in Dubrovnik and was chaired by Vera K. Of course, we all hope that you, too, will find it useful and want to vote for it at our business-meeting in Prague.

This also means that we would like to hear about your suggestions for improvement! Since we will have a limited amount of time at that meeting, please voice your ideas NOW or asap, so that we can all think about them and incorporate them into a draft which can then be adopted at the meeting.

Happy to have Olga and Lenka with us at our Saturday meeting…

We have also made further plans for SiT’s Tenth Anniversary, which we will be celebrating in Prague on the second evening of the IWM, along with our classic taste-sharing evening. Miodrag is making a collected bibliography of the last ten years, and will run a video-show as the evening progresses.

We have also asked Slavica, whose idea it was, and Eszter, to hang an exhibition of pictures from the ten years. If you have something memorable, touching, or hilarious, please paste it on a Din A4 page (like this one) and write the year in the upper right-hand corner. If you have an extra copy of it, or can have one made, then we could keep your contribution at the end of the Prague meeting as the beginning of SiT archives. (If you start preparing now, maybe you will find some very interesting pictures in time to have such copies made).

Does anyone have other anniversary ideas?

The Board meeting is over...

Other things to think about now include:

Who would you like to nominate for the 2 free spaces on the Board?

(Since the ‘left-over’ members are Dagmar, Miodrag, and me, at least one of the incomers should be a man, and there should probably be ‘an Easterner’ and ‘a Westerner’, in order to have good balance). Please send your nominations to Jancis, who has agreed to be Election Coordinator.

** where should we have our IWM’s in 2003 and 2004? Miodrag hopes to host us in Macedonia next year, if the area manages to maintain peace this time, and I would like to try to do it in Berlin in 2005. Who would like to have us inbetween?

So now I hope you will all agree that we have a very lively and talented organisation, and I hope that you will contribute to making it stronger and even more varied by offering any and all feed-back on these and other ideas both to Dagmar, our Editor, and to me.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Prague and/or elsewhere –

And wishing all of you all the best in your everyday work on all our themes –