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upcoming meetings in Madrid (2007) and Australia (2010), is given in Table 1. Proposals to hold the 2013 congress in the Americas have been submitted for Montreal, Canada, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Organizational structure
The ICA currently has a membership of 45 national acoustical societies which are listed in Table 2. Until 1998 the Commission essentially operated independently from this broader representation of acoustical activity taking place around the world. Board members were elected by the General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). Since IUPAP has no formal link to the national acoustical societies in most countries, this made the nomination process difficult. The ICA Board had many discussions in the 1994-1996 time frame to plan and imple- ment a more democratic operation to include acousticians and acoustical societies from the entire international com- munity. An integral part of the plan was to contact 41 nation- al acoustical societies to obtain ideas on how this objective could be achieved. As a result of these deliberations the Commission decided to make a formal proposal to IUPAP, the international organization to which it reported. ICA’s proposal was to modify its status within IUPAP from an International Commission (C7) to an Affiliated International Commission. This would allow the ICA to operate under a more democratic structure. New Statutes were adopted by the International Commission for Acoustics in Antwerp in March 1996. These statutes were approved by the IUPAP
General Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden in September 1996 and the ICA changed its status accordingly to become the International Commission for Acoustics (AC3). As an Affiliated Commission, the ICA was allowed to have individ- ual or “national” members, collect dues, and have a defined administrative structure. Acoustical societies from around the world were then invited to join the newly structured organization, and 35 national acoustical societies responded positively. The “new” ICA held its first General Assembly on 25 June 1998 during the 16th triennial Congress in Seattle where the Bylaws of the new organization were adopted by the Member Societies. Three General Assemblies have now been held: Seattle (1998), Rome (2001) and Kyoto (2004). The fourth will be held in Madrid in September 2007 during the 19th Congress.
During this same time period the ICA also applied to become an Affiliated Organization of the International Union of Applied and Theoretical Mechanics (IUTAM). A motion in favor of Affiliation was adopted unanimously at the IUTAM General Assembly Meeting held at the University of Stuttgart in1998. Figure 1 shows that IUPAP and IUTAM are two of 29 Scientific Unions reporting to the International Council for Science (formerly the International Council for Scientific Unions which kept its abbreviation as ICSU). The International Council for Science was created in 1931 and is the oldest existing non-governmental body committed to promote international scientific cooperation for the benefit of humanity. ICSU maintains a formal working relationship with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Fig. 1. ICA organization chart.
26 Acoustics Today, July 2007