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The second issue of eJSS
launches just after the first "truly international"
ISSC was completed. The System Safety Society's
21st International System Safety Conference has
indeed become international, as we stepped across
the U.S. border into Canada. As in the discipline
of system safety itself, many times great progress
is achieved through small steps. Ottawa, Canada's
capital city, is located just a few miles outside
the border of the United States. Yet, as we ventured
into our neighboring country, we were immediately
exposed to a blend of cultures, languages and
traditions that added a distinctly international
flavor to this Conference.
In Ottawa, the blend of internationalism is apparent
in every facet of society, from the seats in government
to the local shopkeepers. For almost a week, we
were immersed in a culture that takes bilingual
speaking for granted, and multilingual parlance
as a matter of course. In all of our previous
Conferences, the "international flavor and
variety" came to us. With the 21st ISSC,
the SSS has started a new tradition of hosting
international system safety practitioners on their
own soil. Not only are there many different cultures
already present in Canada to make this a truly
diverse Conference, but the internationalism attached
to the location itself garnered added interest
and enthusiasm and ideas among the attendees.
At the Ottawa Conference, the SSS had the opportunity
to make substantial progress toward unifying its
aims, goals, perspectives, aspirations and objectives
across all countries. As those of us attending
from the U.S. as international visitors participated
in the week's tutorials, meetings, sessions and
social events, perhaps we, too, began to
see system safety and the SSS from a different,
and slightly more universal, perspective.
We label ourselves as an international society,
yet the largest contingency (the U.S. members)
has been the most reluctant to entertain change.
We have tried to govern system safety universally
based on our own, U.S.-bred methodologies. Perhaps
this year, as "outsiders," we can learn
to improve system safety by adopting, adapting,
embracing or simply acknowledging concepts that
we have previously ignored for so long — simply
because they weren't our own. There are many ways
to ensure system safety, but there is no absolute
right way. It was appropriate that we worked together
in Ottawa to build an international system safety
society that fosters, nurtures, and most importantly,
embraces system safety ideas from around the world.
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