Creation of the committee

• Representative pictures of bonding approaches to be added here

Constitution of the European Committee on Chemical Bonding (ECCB)", 2017

Initiative

Following the inspiring efforts taken in Rouen with the organization of the European Symposium on Chemical Bonding and the discussion among the scientific committee that followed, it has become evident that the Chemical Bonding community needs to get organized for collaboration and funding issues. Following the example of other communities at the national and international level, the following guidelines seem necessary:

• Establishing a main 2-year span conference on Chemical Bonding
• Constituting a Chemical Bond Committee
• Calling for a Chemical Bond award among young scientists

All these procedure guidelines should foster the cohesion and visibility of the community. Both characteristics are necessary for being able to respond to today’s financial needs.

Spirit

The committee should be dynamical and represent the whole bonding community. In order to achieve so:

• the committee members should not be permanent.
• they should represent all approaches
• they should represent the different countries at the European level in which these approaches are developed

Constituting committee

In order to create the 1st ECCB a constituting committee has been formed from the previous European Symposia on Chemical Bonding ([ESCB1] and [ESCB2])

The role of this committee is to ease the creation of a representative first ESCB.

Members

All members from the ESCB1 and ESCB2. This yields 16 people without repetitions:

• Committee ESCB1: L. Joubert, V. Tognetti, B. Braïda, M. Bickelhaupt, J. Contreras-Gacía, C. Corminboeuf, P. Macchi, P. Popelier, M. Yañez http://escb1.univ-rouen.fr/content/committees

• Committee ESCB2 (wo/ repetitions) : A. Martin Pendás, E. Matito, M. Alonso, O. Mo, J. Pilmé, B. Silvi, M. Solà http://www.escb2oviedo.com/en/committees.php

Mission

Since the "electing community" is not fixed and the committee should not be permanent, the role of the consituting committee is to democratically ensure the constitution of a representative 1st ECCB

Steps Taken

In order to make sure a democratic and transparent process takes place, the constituting committee proceeds through online voting of the different measures:

07/01/2018 Contact the constituting committee for collecting a set of possible rules.

23/01/2018 Vote for the number of peolple to constitute the committee. Results: 13 (1 vote), 15 (14 votes), 17 (2 votes). A committee of 15 members will thus be created.

30/01/2018 Vote on the rules and guides for the constitution of the committee based on: scientific approaches, countries and gender. Results not yet known.

Initiatives

Difussion list

A diffusion list on chemical bonding is being created to enable an easy and fully-covering difussion of the ECCB initiatives. The link to suscribe will be available here soon

This should also enable an easy difussion of PhD/postdoctoral grants

Bond Slam

Controversial bonding cases were reviewed at the Unusual Bonding Slam that was organized as part of the Chemical Bonds at the 21st Century conference held in Aachen.

This initiative should help a fluid discussion of controversies, epistemological questions while providing visibility to the community. Hence, editions are foreseen in the future ESCBs.

Other initiatives

In order to keep a dynamic and active committee, suggestions for new actions from the floor for new initiatives will be wellcome (e.g. forum, schools, online activities). The implementation will be discussed upon constitution of the 1st ECCB.