President's Message

From Here to There

Abstract

For the past few years there has been a good deal of discussion of a desired future state of the International System Safety Society. This future state which is the “There” I refer to in the title of this article, includes several things: an ISSS-developed standard, system safety integration into engineering curricula, a safety institute, a system safety certification, obtaining external funding for the Society and a paid staff. The present state (i.e., “Here”) has several characteristics: a very small level of paid staffing, a good number of excellent volunteers (most of whom have very limited time) and a fairly limited amount of financial resources. I do not have a detailed roadmap on how to get from here to there (that will hopefully come out of the ongoing strategic plan effort), but I do have some thoughts on some considerations that I hope are useful to the future EC.