News Detail

ACI International—or Not

9/1/2002

This month’s memo is devoted to the international side of the Institute. Being an active international organization poses both opportunities and challenges for us.

In July, ACI Past President Jim Jirsa, Senior Managing Director Bill Tolley, and I completed a 3-week trip to Japan, New Zealand, Australia, China, and Korea. We visited concrete organizations in each of these countries to determine how ACI could best work with them in the future. Ultimately, we hope to define and sign international partnership agreements with each of these organizations.

For some of our visits, we were renewing contacts with organizations with which ACI has had a long history. These groups included the Japan Concrete Institute, the New Zealand Concrete Society, the Concrete Institute of Australia, Cement & Concrete Association of Australia, and the Korean Concrete Institute. The Japan Concrete Institute and the Korean Concrete Institute began as ACI chapters, and both groups have cooperated with the Institute for many years.

In China, we broke new ground and made initial contacts. There, we met with the China Academy of Building Research, the China Building Materials Academy, the Chinese Ceramic Society, and the China Civil Engineering Society. Each of these organizations engages in activities similar to those of ACI.

There is no doubt that the technical work of ACI is well known and respected by all of these groups. This respect says a lot for the quality, integrity, and the ultimate products of our consensus process.

In our visits to each organization, we gave a brief description of current ACI structure and activities and discussed areas for potential future interaction. These areas included:

• Membership on technical committees—We described the recent changes in technical committee rules for voting memberships (see last month’s President’s Memo), and every group we talked to expressed interest in serving on our technical committees. If the interest translates into memberships, this initiative will bring new, well-qualified members to our committees, as well as bringing additional technical information quickly and directly into our documents.
• International publications—The ACI Board of Direction has approved a new type of publication called the International Series. These publications will originate from one of our international partners and will bear the logos of both the organization developing the document and ACI. A note in the document will tell the readers exactly how the document was developed and reviewed by the originating organization. We expect this new series to bring outside technology to North America. Look for the first of these publications to be announced in the very near future.
• Publications availability—Many of the organizations visited are developing documents of extremely high quality. Some cover topics not yet found in ACI publications. Here, we seek agreements for advertising and marketing these documents to make the information available to ACI members.
• Knowledge access—We also discussed worldwide access to concrete technical information. Regardless of who developed the information, there was wide agreement that some type of web-based system for accessing it was a desirable long-term goal of all of our organizations. ACI could take the lead role in putting such a system together; the groups we visited are certainly interested in participating.

This brief description of our trip highlights some international opportunities for ACI. However, none of these activities will come without a price tag. To accomplish these or any other international activities, we must devote funding that will probably not be repaid in the short term. The ACI Board of Direction believes these activities are essential to the long-term viability of the Institute, and will be determining how best to fund such work within budget constraints.

Terry Holland
President,
American Concrete Institute

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