PM's Perspective - May 2017

Workshop and Technical Meetings Plan 2018-2023

This month I want to bring to your attention MSIAC’s plans for workshops and technical meetings coming up over the next five years. Workshops are a significant investment for our member nations and are a major undertaking for MSIAC, particularly with respect to preparation of technical reports to support discussion and to record the outcome. Therefore, it is important that the topics are deemed sufficiently important and address current issues faced by the Munition Safety or Insensitive Munitions communities.  To help ensure that this is the case we are requesting your input on the plan.

The list below is split into workshops and technical meetings. Workshops are a larger undertaking and involve bringing about 60 subject matter experts together to address an issue, typically over the course of a week. The first workshop in the series has already been agreed in principal for 2018 and is covered in a separate article in this newsletter. A further three potential workshop topics are listed in no particular order of priority.

Technical meetings are often facilitated by MSIAC, are typically one to a few days in length, and are often arranged as meeting of opportunity on the back of other events. MSIAC is already committed to undertaking a number of technical meetings (as indicated) but the others are listed in no particular order of priority.    

I would like to invite you to review the topics listed and to provide your thoughts on their importance and priority. To facilitate this we have established a web form where you can input this information. This website will remain active until the end of June 2017 so you have plenty of time to send us your input (https://www.msiac.nato.int/survey-17501).