Welcome to the International Cartographic Association
Welcome to the website of the International Cartographic AssociationGet to know the new ICA Executive Committee for the term 2023-2027
Welcome to the website of the International Cartographic Association
Get to know the new ICA Executive Committee for the term 2023-2027

Results of the 18th General Assembly of the ICA

The 18th ICA General Assembly was closed on the last day of ICC2019.
Slides of the agenda can be found here.

EC at ICC2019

The new Executive Committee for the term 2019–2023 on stage at the closing ceremony of ICC2019

 

The Executive Committee for the term 2019–2023 is:

  • President: Tim Trainor (USA)
  • Secretary-General and Treasurer: Thomas Schulz (Switzerland)
  • Vice-Presidents:
    • Andrés Arístegui (Spain)
    • Temenoujka Bandrova (Bulgaria)
    • Philippe De Maeyer (Belgium)
    • Liqiu Meng (Germany)
    • Terje Midtbø (Norway)
    • Vít Voženílek (Czech Republic)
    • László Zentai (Hungary)
  • Past President: Menno-Jan Kraak (The Netherlands)

The 19th General Assembly and the 31st International Cartographic Conference in 2023 will be held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Honorary auditors: Harold Moellering (USA) and Bengt Rystedt (Sweden).

Category: General News

President’s Blog: Nominations for the upcoming General Assembly

Dear all,

February 15 was the deadline for nominations for EC members, commissions, commission chairs, honorary auditors, and the bid for organising ICC2023. I’m happy to announce that we did receive many nominations and that at our General Assembly during the Tokyo ICC in July our national members will vote on the candidates.

Curious? Follow this link to the nominations.

– Menno-Jan Kraak
President of the International Cartographic Association

President’s Blog: Introducing Regional Cartographic Conferences (RCC)

The ICA Executive Committee at its latest meeting in Budapest, Hungary

The ICA Executive Committee at its latest meeting in Budapest, Hungary

Twice a year ICA’s Executive Committee meets to discuss current affairs and strategic issues. Last February we were hosted by the Secretary-General’s university in Budapest.

Current affairs are related to the day-to-day running of ICA. These can include membership, the activities of the commissions and working groups, our website, relations with sister organization, our financial situation, our next ICC, prepare the (Extraordinary) General Assembly, etc.

The strategic issues we discussed are related to more long term issues. These are managed by the vice-presidents and include our organization (is our structure future proof?), our publication policy (can we improve/upgrade/unify the publication created during conferences and commission and working groups activities?), conference policy (how do we organize our meetings?), capacity building (how do we involve industry?), membership (do we need individual membership?), research (how to update and further develop of our research agenda?), our specific relation to other organizations (what can we do for the UN-GGIM?).

In future blogs we will report in more detail about these strategic issues. However, as a result of our deliberation on our conference policy we have decided to start a series of Regional Cartographic Conferences (RCC). The first call for these conferences can be found here.

Our aim is that RCCs will complement ICCs by providing a regional forum for presentation and exchange of new ideas and approaches to cartography and geographic information science through a mixture of keynote, plenary, technical and poster sessions, as well as workshops and map exhibitions.

– Menno-Jan Kraak
President of the International Cartographic Association

President’s Blog: General assembly, regional conferences and scholarships

EC Meeting in Madrid, Spain

EC Meeting in Madrid, Spain

During the last Executive Committee meeting in Madrid, we have made the following decisions:

We are preparing a Call for an Extraordinary General Assembly during the ICC2017 in Washington. The purpose is to change some articles of the statues to guarantee a smoother flow of ICA activities.

Establish Regional Cartographic Conference (RCC) series in the non-ICC years. There is a clear need to have ‘local’ conferences next to our bi-annual International Cartographic Conferences, as was recently again proven by the successful EuroCarto event in Vienna. A call to organize the first RCC’s in 2018 is being prepared and will be made public by the end of 2016.

The ICA scholarship rules have been refreshed and can be found at icaci.org/scholarship. We now have scholarships available for young scientists and professionals from our member nations to participate in our ICC’s, the RCC’s and also Commission and Working Group events. There is extra funding available for cartographers and GIScientists from non-developed member states.

Menno-Jan Kraak
– President of the International Cartographic Association

President’s Blog: Report of the ICA Commissions and Working groups meeting in Vienna

November 8 and 9, 2015 the (co)chairs of ICA’s Commissions and Working Groups met with the members of the Executive Committee (EC) to discuss the future activities of the ICA. The objective of the meeting was to offer the ICA officers a good and fresh start for the 2015–2019 period. A side effect of the meeting was that all of us met new and old friends, and we had a chance to become familiar with each other.

The meeting, hosted by the Past-President at the Technical University of Vienna, was organized in three distinct parts. The first dealt with “What ICA expects from you”, the second part with “What do you expect from ICA”. The third part was linked to the International Map Year (IMY) and the UN sustainability goals.

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What ICA expects from you

After an introduction round, Laszlo Zentai, our Secretary-General informed us on how ICA Commissions and Working Groups are supposed to operate, based on our statues and by-laws. This included information on how to organize a Commission (Chair/co-chair, website, members etc), how to communicate within ICA (the newsletter, the bi-annual report to the EC), options for publication of results (our International Journal of Cartography, again ICA news and the Springer book series), activities related to our International Cartographic Conferences (reviews, (joint)workshops, business meetings), and financial support. This might seem trivial since all information is available on the website, but it proves that these sessions are useful anyhow.

In an exercise the (co)chairs had to revisit their terms of reference, and decide which of those will be their focus point in the next four years. These so-called flagship projects could be joint commissions efforts. Also they had to think of there planned activities on the short term and for whole 2015-2019 period, to allow us share and combine events. And as you can imagine, they had to indicate how they would think to contribute to the International Map Year.

What do you expect from ICA

This session started with short presentations by different EC members of what we call ICA’s instruments, such as our strategic plan, the ICA directory, publications, the research agenda, our scholarships, and ICA external relations with the Joint Board of GIS and the GeoUnions. The first unites international organizations involved with geospatial information and strives to act as a collective and unified voice at the international level, such as within the UN. The second represents those geo-related organizations that are member of ICSU.

After this flow of information, the (co)chairs where asked to react and express their opinion about our instruments both from a positive and negative perspective. They where also asked to come forward with any issue they would like to see discussed to be able to let ICA better operate.

IMY / Mapping the sustainability goals

The third part of the workshop dealt with the International Map Year (IMY) and how we as ICA can make an impact by “mapping” the sustainability goals.

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The new UN 17 sustainability goals can be found at sustainabledevelopment.un.org. Each of these goals has a specific objective. For instance Goal 4 on education states: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. For each goal a number of targets have been set. An example of an educational target is “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes”. To see if those target are met multiple indicator have been defined. Indicators are numbers, for instance “Completion rate (primary, lower secondary, upper secondary)”.

These indicators can be mapped. As individual variable or in combination with each other. During the IMY ICA will organize a cartographic exhibition at the next UNGGIM meeting in New York, August 2016. The plan is to create a set of 17 posters, one for each goal that demonstrates how maps can help to get insight in these goals. The plan is not just to create a single map for each goal. The idea is to offer different cartographic perspectives on these goals via story maps. These perspectives are offered by our Commissions. Each of the 17 goals has been adopted by two Commissions and together these wil map a goal based on their skills set. So for instance the poster that involved the Commission on Visual analytics might show how in an exploratory environment one can combine different indicators to reveal trends, the poster involving the Commission Mountain Cartography could show how the landscape influences the distribution of certain phenomena. The poster co-designed by the Commission on Map Projections might show good and bad examples of global projection.

The final goal of this exercise is to create an atlas of best practices of mapping the sustainability goals. This should be ready by the end of the 2015–2019 period.

– Menno-Jan Kraak
President of the International Cartographic Association

Joint ICA meeting in Vienna, November 8–9

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All chairs and vice-chairs of the ICA commissions and working groups were invited to join an ICA meeting in Vienna on 8–9 November 2015 to plan and discuss their activities for the term 2015–2019. 46 chairs, vice-chairs and members of the executive committee followed the invitation and spent two intensive workshop days at Technische Universität Wien.

Meeting participants

Commission chairs and vice-chairs

Working Group International Map Year

Executive Committee

Website

More photos of the workshop can be found on the ICA Facebook page.

President’s Blog: Introducing the new ICA president

Portrait Menno-Jan KraakDear colleagues and friends,

It is a privilege to serve the ICA as your president for the next four years in our dynamic world where maps play an important role as interface to geo-related information to support decision making in many different situations.

It is obvious I do this not alone. I can and will built on the shoulders of my predecessors. And I do realize it is quite a responsibility because Georg Gartner, the now past-president has left us a healthy association. During his term ICA has been enriched in many ways. Think of our new journal, our embedding in ICSU and relation with UN-GGIM, the GeoforAll initiative and the beautiful website.

Secondly, I will act with an enthusiastic team. The newly elected members of the Executive Committee and the new Commission Chairs will allow me to put new accents.

Especially the newly established Working group Cartography for Global Geographic Information Management can put such accent. With this working group the plan is to provide the UN-GGIM an ‘atlas’ of good cartographic practice for the new sustainable development goals.

Dear all, over the next four year let’s make the world a better place with maps!

Menno-Jan Kraak

Results of the 16th General Assembly of the ICA

The 16th ICA General Assembly was closed on the last day of ICC2015.
Slides of the agenda can be found here.

The Executive Committee for the term 2015-2019 is:

  • President: Menno-Jan Kraak (The Netherlands)
  • Secretary-General and Treasurer: László Zentai (Hungary)
  • Vice-Presidents:
    • Sara Fabrikant (Switzerland)
    • David Forrest (United Kingdom)
    • Yaolin Liu (China)
    • Pilar Sanchez-Ortiz (Spain)
    • Monika Sester (Germany)
    • Lynn Usery (USA)
    • Vít Voženílek (Czech Republic)
  • Past President: Georg Gartner (Austria)

The 17th General Assembly and the 29th International Cartographic Conference in 2019 will be held in Tokyo, Japan.

All corresponding website subpages (EC, conferences, commissions, working groups) will be updated within the course of next week. Please stay tuned.

Category: General News

Final President’s Blog by Georg Gartner: Welcome Menno-Jan Kraak!

Georg Gartner at ICC2015 wearing an #welovemaps shirtDear collegues and friends of ICA,

ICC2015 brings a change of persons in charge. After four years of being president of ICA this function is passed to Prof Menno-Jan Kraak from the Netherlands according to the General Assembly of ICA.

In this context I would like to express my sincere thanks for all the support and collaboration I was happy to receive from so many of you; for many of the projects, ideas and efforts we have taken. It is because of this, why I consider those four years as most rewarding and successful on a personal level.

I would like to share with you my final report, describing some of the efforts and achievements which have been taken from so many in the term 2011–2015 and I would be happy to receive any comments on that.

It was a privilege to serve the International Cartographic Association as President from 2011 to 2015. I’m looking forward to the future of ICA under the presidency of Menno-Jan Kraak!

unterschrift-gg

Nominations for the next ICA Executive Committee (2015–2019)

The summary of nominations the ICA got by the deadline of March 23 for the next Executive Committee (2015–2019):

  • President: Menno-Jan Kraak (The Netherlands)
  • Secretary-General: László Zentai (Hungary)
  • EC members (in the order of nomination date): Sara Fabrikant (Switzerland), Lynn Usery (USA), Vít Voženílek (Czech Republic), David Forrest (United Kingdom), Monika Sester (Germany), Masatoshi Arikawa (Japan), Pilar Sanchez-Ortiz (Spain), Yaolin Liu (China), Igor Drecki (New Zealand)

 
According to the ICA Statutes:

The Executive Committee of the Association consists of the following members:

  • The President of the Association, who presides over all regular and extraordinary General Assemblies, the meetings of the Executive Committee, International Cartographic Conferences and acts as the main representative of the Association.
  • A Past President, who shall serve for one term following the term of President.
  • Five to seven Vice-Presidents, the exact number to be decided at the General Assembly of Delegates. They assist the President in the performance of his or her different duties.
  • A Secretary General and Treasurer, who is responsible for the administration and the general running of the Association.

The nominees will introduce themselves on the first day of the ICA General Assembly (23 August), the voting will take place on the second day of the General Assembly (28 August). The nomination documents (CV, declaration and the official nomination) will be available on the ICA website later as part of the General Assembly documentation.

László Zentai
– ICA Secretary-General

Category: General News
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