I have been nominated for the EATCS Council elections. I am honoured by the nomination, and I would be happy to do my share to help the association.
Here is a brief description of my views for the future of EATCS. In general, I think EATCS and the theoretical computer science community in Europe are going strong. However, I also see some areas with opportunities for improvement. Below are two examples of areas that I would like to develop further.
I am very pleased that the ICALP proceedings will be published open access in the LIPIcs series, starting in 2016. EATCS has been an exemplary supporter of open science, first making the Bulletin openly available already in 2007, and now doing the same for the flagship conference.
However, the association is also involved in many other conferences: for example, in 2015, there are 8 conferences organised in cooperation with EATCS, out of which only one has open-access proceedings. EATCS could encourage the organisers of these events to move towards open access, and EATCS could also use open access as one of the criteria for choosing which events to sponsor.
I believe that the brand of EATCS should weigh more than the brand of, e.g., Springer LNCS, as a sign of quality.
EATCS has relatively little presence on social media — an organisation with more than 1000 members only has 50 followers on Twitter, a bit more than 100 on Facebook, and roughly 20 on Google+. The social media pages are mainly used to distribute CFPs and job ads; there is hardly any discussion.
At the same time, the Bulletin publishes a large number of articles, many of which could be of interest to a broader audience beyond the current EATCS members, but based on discussions with my colleagues, relatively few people read articles that appear in the Bulletin.
EATCS could gradually transition towards a dual-publishing model in which the articles that currently appear only in the Bulletin would also be published e.g. as blog posts and advertised on social media. Instead of having new articles appear only three times a year in the Bulletin, the online versions of the articles could appear more evenly throughout the year, with priority given to timely conference reports and other news items.
Ideally, this would increase the visibility of EATCS and the Bulletin, and also encourage more active online discussions related to TCS on social media.