Forty Years Of The Coordinating Committee For Geoscience - CCOP

Box 7
On being a ‘Rapporteur’
Each year at the Annual Session of CCOP a Rapporteur is elected whose task is to record the
proceedings of the session and produce a draft report to be scrutinised and adopted by the
delegates before closure of the session. This is, and always has been, a very demanding job.
Dr Deryck Laming, who was Senior Geologist (Technical Editor) with CCOP for two years
from 1972-74 writes that a part of his duties was to act as Rapporteur at the Annual Sessions.
He recalls that this was an eighteen hours-a-day job, gathering all the papers issued
beforehand, taking notes of discussion during the meeting, preparing a daily record, talking
with speakers to find out if they really meant what they had said and finally, at the end of the
week, printing everything out in multiple copies so that the delegates could read through it
and see what each had said, and amend things if they realised that they had said something
they shouldn’t have done. It was a daunting task but was rewarded by the triumph of
presenting an acceptable document on the last day of the meeting.
Dr Tony Reedman was the Cooperating Country representative of the UK for the ten years
from 1990 and acted as Rapporteur for many of the Annual Sessions during this period. He
records that though the task was still a daunting one, the introduction of word processing and
the skill of the Thai secretaries of the CCOP Secretariat were a great help. However, the
individual papers being presented were becoming longer and unexpected hitches could throw
the reporting process into confusion. In 1992, for example, the computers, specially brought
to Hanoi from Bangkok for the task, dramatically failed just as the final report was being
prepared and large parts of the text disappeared into the virtual ether. The hard-pressed but
conscientious secretaries worked almost all night to re-process the pages but even so the final
report was completed and approved by delegates only after the rapporteur had left Hanoi for
another pressing engagement.
On another occasion, in 1998, the Annual Session took place in the shadow of the recently
active Mt. Pinatubo at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Here the combination of a typhoon and
an earthquake during the course of the meeting caused a breakdown in the power supply and
work on report production had to continue by the light of a kerosene lamp and with the help
only of a single lap-top computer until power was eventually restored (Figure 18).
Nevertheless, in spite of these and various other unpredictable obstacles, the present CCOP
archive contains reports of each and every Session since their inception in 1966.
Striving for Efficiency (1970s and 1980s)
The Annual Sessions of CCOP would always be the crucial meeting at which the Member
Countries could discuss all aspects of CCOP business and set work programmes for the
following year. The venue for each Annual Session continued to rotate between Member
Countries (Table 1) and the attendance of the Special Advisers (Figure 17) representing the
Cooperating Countries and, in later years, the Honorary Advisers, provided a valuable input of
outside opinion and expertise. However, after the first few years, the Annual Sessions were
becoming increasingly formal and somewhat cumbersome with a complex structure involving
two plenary sessions, a TAG session and a session of the Special Advisers. By 1978 the Special
Advisers reported that they were concerned with the amount of time required for each Annual
Session which by now amounted to as much as sixteen days including two weekends.
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A World of Difference