At the present the NCS have 14.200 individual members and 1.200 company members, attached to NCS' 9 local affiliates, through out Norway. The Society has about 50 Special Interest Groups (SIGs) covering a wide area of topics. SIGs are the main contributors to activities like seminars, conferences, courses, member society meetings and projects within our Society.

Total number of seminars, conferences and courses during 2000 was 125, and more than 100 meetings were held during this period. A wide spectre of topics has been presented at these activities. The most popular conferences in 2000/2001: Electronic Document Management, CTI, Distributed Component Technology, Bank/Finance/e-Commerce, Project Management, IT and disabled, and ROOTS- int. Conference on Recent Object Oriented Trends ( www.roots.dnd.no ). The annual "Software" is still the biggest event in NCS, with 25 conferences/courses and expo during 5 days.

One strategically goal for NCS is to be a considerable contributor within the area of life-long learning and certification of IT competence.

NCS has for the third year success with offering IT-courses, which will count as part of formal education in co-operation with Universities and Colleges. The programme has been expanded this year. Among the most popular courses are "Component based system development" and "OO-programming with Java".

A few years back CEPIS (Council of European Professional Computer Societies) developed the highly successful "European Computer Driving Licence" for PC users. Norway passed 100.000 ECDL participants earlier this year. "Datakortet as" – which is the company NCS established to offer the ECDL in Norway, has also an international licence for ECDL in Tunisa and Russia.

NCS is now strongly involved in establishing a new pan European project: European Professional Informatics Competence Services – EPICS within CEPIS. The aim is to increase the IT competence level, attract new practioners to the IT profession and contribute to reduce the so called European IT skills Gap estimated in the range of 2-4 million persons for the next few years. The EPICS project is both an educational/training programme based on a joint Syllabus and with testing facilities and certification to support IT professionals and practioners with their need for life-long learning and continuous professional development.

The Government has appointed the NCS as partner for eNorway Action Plan, within the field of life long learning and the area of ICT and disabled. The NCS is also engaged in influencing the IT- policies in Norway, especially in the area of education and telecommunications.

Several of our TC-representatives have attended at TC-meetings during last period, but the participation varies. Some are significantly involved in programme committees for IFIP-conferences.

The NCS arranged a special travelling program for members to IFIP World Computer Congress in Bejiing in 2000 with success, and will consider repeating this for WCC 2002. We also would like to express our appreciation to IFIP for awarding Asbjørn Rolstadås with the Isac L. Auerbach Award at WCC 2000.

The NCS has not organised any IFIP-events in Norway in the last twelve months, but the NCS' policy is still to attract international conferences to Norway. Last application for a IFIP-activity was for Interact 2003. This was turned down.

The NCS' representatives in IFIP TCs are as follows:

We recognises that there is some strategically move towards including the IT-industry more strongly within IFIP, but still we feel that the organisation is quite dominated by the academic field. The interest in IFIPs activities and the recruitment to IFIP is therefore quite narrow compared with the composition of memberships within our society and probably many other societies. Our point of view is that synergies between the academic field and the IT industry is important and should be approved and improved. Our inputs are therefore:

• Broadening the IFIP activities and recruitment beyond academic field
• The practice of accepting new members to IFIP Working Groups should not be to restrict.

The IFIPs website is impressive – well-structured and informative – keep up the good work here.