Given the growing number of ECCO members, to keep the organization manageable, I propose to distinguish two categories: 1) "full" members, and 2) "affiliated" members. The full members are supposed to have their core academic activities within ECCO (they can have other, non-academic activities elsewhere), while the affiliated members do their core research within another research group (e.g. CLWF, MOSI or COMO), but from time to time participate in ECCO activities (e.g. seminars or email discussions) and are generally interested in collaboration with other ECCO members.
In principle, according to VUB rules, it is possible to have "core" activities in more than one research group, so becoming an ECCO member does not exclude being engaged in another research group. I just leave it up to you to decide in how far you want to be involved: as full or as affiliated members. The practical implication is that full members are expected to participate in most external or internal ECCO activities, such as meetings, and in return can count on the support of the other members, while the affiliated members are merely informed about the more public and scientific activities, in which they are free to participate or not.
As a first rule of thumb, I consider all my PhD students to be full ECCO members, and leave it up to the others to state whether they want to be listed as "full", or remain "affiliated" by default. This resulting provisional membership list can be found on http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ECCO/ Of course, this subdivision will never be absolute, and some people will fall "in between" the two categories.
Since we haven't had any public activities lately, let me report on the internal organization.
First, Marko Rodriguez has joined us last week, on a one-year visit from the University of California at Santa Cruz, to work on algorithms to support collective decision-making. He is presently sharing my office in the CLEA house.
Klaas Chielens has officially started to work on an OZR project about linguistic aspects of memetics on Oct. 1, but is still waiting for several practical issues to be settled, such as getting a computer and an office. Unfortunately, since space is tight in the CLEA house, it has become difficult to locate more people there, and Klaas will probably be settled officially in the faculty LW in their new room for researchers, B407.
Both Mixel Kiemen (computer scientist interested in consciousness and cognition) and Laetitia De Jaegher (legal expert interested in systems approaches) are exploring ways to fund their PhD research in ECCO, via the FWO or European projects.
Andreas Loengarov (sociologist working on computer simulations of social networks and evolution) has received an offer to make a PhD in Scotland, but will anyway try to keep close contact with ECCO and visit regularly.
Erden Goktepe is a Turkish political scientist who will arrive in Brussels on Nov. 1 to visit ECCO and discuss the possibilities to come and work here on a PhD, in which he would apply systems and complexity thinking to international relations. He is also applying for funding, and seems optimistic that he will get a job that could pay for his studies.
Dirk Bollen, younger brother of my former PhD student Johan, is a psychologist interested in situated and embodied cognition. He would like to collaborate with ECCO and will shortly come to meet us and discuss the possibilities.
Julien Libbrecht has a PhD in philosophy and is working half-time in health-care management. He would like to do PostDoc research in ECCO on applying cybernetic thinking to the organization of health care.
Given these likely new arrivals, it seems that our first priority will be to find sufficient office space on campus. Any suggestions about unused spaces anywhere on the VUB are most welcome! Ideally, all full ECCO members (some 8 people) should find a space in the same building or wing, but the given the tightness of space, this will be a difficult exercise...
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Francis Heylighen Center "Leo Apostel" Free University of Brussels http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
