Our Boston conference is just 2 months away, with what will certainly be our biggest attendance ever. Hopefully this conference will also confirm a general trend of late, which is that ICA is getting more and more international, with scholars and graduate students coming from the four corners of the world.

In the spirit of this process of internationalization, the ICA Liaison Committee, chaired by Noshir Contractor (Northwestern U, USA), was recently asked to work on redefining the role and duties of ICA Board Members-at-Large. As you might be aware, our association's Board of Directors presently includes five regional Board Members-at-Large, who are supposed to represent five different regions of the world where ICA is (more or less) represented in terms of membership. They are elected to 3-year staggered terms with one or two members elected each year.

This year, we have scholars representing East Asia (Eun-Ju Lee, Seoul National U, South Korea); North America (R. G. Lentz, McGill U, Canada); Europe (Gianpietro Mazzoleni, U of Milan, Italy); Oceania (Juliet Roper, U of Waikato, New Zealand); and West & South Asia (Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka). Their activities of representation are, of course, very important because they allow specific concerns and preoccupations to be voiced in the decisional context of our Board of Directors.

One idea we would like to work on, however, is to make this activity of representation work both ways, so to speak. If regional Board Members-at-Large indeed represent a key voice for regions of the world that tend to be sometimes underrepresented in our membership (I am thinking of South Asia and some parts of Europe, for instance), we think that these members could also be asked, in the future, to work as ICA ambassadors for these parts of the globe.

What would it mean, concretely speaking? I, of course, would like to let the Liaison Committee define the key aspects and modalities of this new function, but it seems clear, in my opinion, that regional Board Members-at-Large could be asked to represent ICA whenever they attend local conferences. If ICA wants to become truly international, a first important step is to publicize its existence to various parts of the world, which is why representation by the Board Members-at-Large could be so crucial.

Our responsibility, as an association, could then be to provide these members with any material (leaflets, PowerPoint presentations, etc.) that could be deemed useful to them when they present our association to other scholars and students. Looking forward to seeing you in Boston!