News – bulletin board

Welcome to VTS57!

Dear VTS57 participant,

Thank you very much for registering for VTS57. IALA is looking forward to welcoming you to IALA HQ following the online Opening Plenary which will be held 14 March 2025 12:00 – 14:00 UTC.

The link to the Opening Plenary, found here, will be open by 11:30 UTC so that you can join early if you wish to. This will mitigate against any technical issues and mean we can begin on time. Please ensure that your MS Team name reflects who you are in accordance with the registration and, if possible, the IALA Member that you are representing.

Once the meeting has started we would like to ask you to mute your microphone and turn your cameras off, unless you are speaking to the plenary as a whole. IALA will be recording the meeting.

The physical week, held at IALA HQ, will commence at 09:30 CET (Paris local time) on Monday 17 March 2025. The itinerary will follow the programme of the week in the VTS documents.

Those wishing to join a task group online may follow the link for that task group, as before, that can be found in the action plan table on the VTS dashboard. Every task group participant needs to be registered. Please note that the working time will be 09:00 – 17:00 CET (Paris local time) except for Monday and Friday. The Committee is expected to finish by 13:00 CET (Paris local time) on Friday 21 March 2025.

I will now take you through some key information:

• Input Papers
• The VTS Mail Group
• The VTS Dashboard
• A reminder of the working arrangements
• ‘Bring Your Own’ VTS Soiree

Input Papers

Input Papers consist of new inputs as well as working papers from the previous session. You will notice that the input paper list does not include the working papers from VTS56. This is in order to aid participants to see only new inputs. The working paper list (VTS57-7.1.2) is a separate input document and the working papers themselves are placed on the fileshare here.

Please download input papers here. The latest input paper list includes some documents that have only just been uploaded and they are highlighted in blue.

The VTS Mail Group

As a registered participant you will be added to this mailing group. This will be one of the main channels to contact the whole Committee on information from the Secretariat and also, if a participant deems it necessary, to contact everyone.

For most issues please continue to e-mail a more targeted list of recipients and only use this mailing group if it is relevant to everybody. This mail group will also be used for the approval procedure as well as the dedicated area on the dashboard. For your information recipients belonging to the VTS Mail Group are:

• Committee Chair and Vice-chair
• All WG chairs and vice-chairs
• All registered participants
• The Secretariat

The VTS Dashboard

The VTS Dashboard includes recent news and updates as well as other pages for you to utilize.

The VTS57 Action Plan sets out what we will work on during this Committee session. The tasks listed have been agreed by the VTS Committee Management Team (Committee Chair and Vice-Chair and all Working Group Chairs and Vice-Chairs) to be progressed during VTS57 through Task Groups. In order to join a Task Group, Committee participants should declare an expression of interest by physically joining the appropriate working group and subsequently the task group or via an e-mail to the specified Task Group Leader, if you are not attending in person, by the 17 March 2024, 18:00 UTC. Details on each task group can be found in the action plan.

The Working Arrangements

In your joining e-mail please find the revised working arrangements where you will find guidance on how we will work during VTS57, including the approval procedure for output documents. Please do contact me if you have any questions regarding them. Please note these have not been amended since September 2022.

‘Bring Your Own’ VTS Soiree

Best wishes,

Tom

IALA Technical Officer and VTS / ARM Secretary