The ASOR Annual General Meeting 11 January 2021

ASOR held an AGM on 11 January 2021 by teleconference. At this meeting members were asked to vote on a revised constitution for ASOR.

Relevant documents (in PDF format):

The revised constitution was accepted unanimously at the meeting, and can be found at ASOR Constitution.

The Treasurers' Report (i.e., financial report) is available at ASOR Financial Report 2019 and 2020.

The President's Report follows:

In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted ASOR's activities. We have had some highlights nevertheless.

  • ASOR was well represented at the December 2019 MODSIM/ASOR/DORS conference in Canberra. ASOR/DORS papers made up just under 10% of the conference as whole. The quantities of conference profit distribution and our costs associated with our guest plenary speaker are detailed in the Treasurer's Report. Our guest plenary speaker Jerry Brown (from Naval Postgraduate School, USA) was very well received at the conference, and as we also learned in 2018 (with Paolo Toth and John Bartholdi giving plenaries), having the pleasure of significant names in our field can certainly attract attendees to our conferences (there were 230 people at the December 2018 National Conference).
  • Zahra HosseiniFard received the ASOR Rising Star Award for 2019 and Kate Smith-Miles received the ASOR Ren Potts Medal.
  • We began March 2020 with a full year of planned Sci+Tech in the City events in Victoria, but this ground to a halt after the first one due to the COVID-19 "lockdowns". STITC will return, and may be teleconferenced nationally, in 2021.
  • We commenced our online seminar series in June 2020 and ran 13 of these events. We have video recordings for most of them (but we are running behind in posting them on the website).
  • Hannah Johns and Semini Wijekoon represented ASOR at the three-day "Pre-APORS conference" run by the OR Society of the Phillipines in October. This was one of IFORS' online events, which continue. ASOR members are reminded that ASOR is part of APORS (Asia-Pacific OR Societies) and IFORS (Intnl. Fed of OR Societies), the latter of which is the global body.
  • We presently have 168 ASOR members.

At the AGM today we seek member approval for a new constitution which will simplify ASOR but moreover make us compliant with the relevant Act. A new national committee will be elected a few weeks after this. There are two Ren Potts Award and two Rising Star Award nominations for 2020 that we will assess once the new national committee is in place.