EIIL Founding Director Michael Abbott will be giving the opening address to over 500 engineers and other (primarily Chinese) decision-makers at the upcoming Hydroinformatics Conference in a beautiful new satellite city (now with some1.4 million habitants) some 40 kilometers from Tianjin, which is the principal port of the Beijing region. The Minister of Water Resources of PR China is expected to open the Conference and some of his staff are also expected to attend the opening ceremony: the very high speed train covers the 140 kilometers between Beijing and Tianjin in less than 30 minutes and then it is another 20 minutes to the satellite city. (When held in the UK the conference was opened by HRH The Princess Royal, Princess Anne, and when in France under the protection of Jacques Chirac, the then President of France,) This is thus a key meeting which its organisers expect to shape the way in which water is protected and employed throughout China and thencein many other places around the world, of which the most significant are in Africa in its increasingly significant position as La Chineafrique. China's water sector constitutes an industry which will be worth many trillions of euros over the next couple of decades.

The keynote address will illustrate several cases of the application of hydroinformatics as a sociotechnology and will challenge China's hydroinformaticians to consider 'ways to further the development of hydroinformatics in its socio technical dimension, with potentially unlimited business opportunities.'  An emphasis will be placed upon the new legislation on land leasing (land-usage rights) and corresponding investment strategies, such as are driving the currently-ongoing rapid development of Central and Western China and thereby changing the lives of some 720 million people, as something that must be historically unique. The Editor of the Financial Times' China Confidential website described any neglect of this aspect as a "colossal error".

Prof. Abbott, creator of the subject of Hydroinformatics in a book published in 1991, will be addressing many of his former students from his time at the UNESCO Institute for Water Education in Delft, which provides a postgraduate education and where he still gives a short course each year. 'It is always a pleasure to see how well one's former students are doing. Many have reached such senior levels in the industry as to have become really influential' said Prof. Abbott.

Also presenting a paper at the conference will be Dr Zoran Vojinovic an alumni of the EIIL's second Winter School led by Prof. Abbott. Zoran will present his paper on the software, data acquisition and knowledge delivery and response issues that arise in active stakeholder participation in water projects, a participation that has been required by law for all major projects in China since 2008. The social-knowledge infrastructure that has been developed in China for supporting such initiatives in 'participative democracy', and specifically 'issue-based democracy', will also be introduced. This form of development was originally accommodated in Europe in the WaterKnowledge initiative that was founded by Prof. Abbott and other leading figures in the water industry in 2007 and introduced at the EIIL in November 2008. This has since spawned several doctoral studies that have provided and continue to provide the software and the most appropriate ways of using it over the web, thereby making powerful tools and techniques accessible to an audience that will include many tens of millions of farmers, aquaculturalists and others, and especially in what is now an ever more rapidly-developing world. This aspect of the EIIL's research, led by Prof. Abbott, continues to provide lessons for other industry sectors, including some in which EIIL's Members  operate. 

(Active stakeholder participation will be a significant discussion topic at the September Programme Management workshop. For further details of the Tianjin conference and Prof. Abbott's address to the conference, please contact This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it   Subject to agreement with Thomas Telford Publishing, Professor Abbott's  2008 Telford Gold Medal-winning paper on active stakeholder participation will shortly be posted on www.knowledge-engineering.org together with some other more recent papers.)