This Infra_Man e-Forum has been created to act as a professional interest group, particularly as a central public electronic platform to identify available resources, to gather comments, insights, contacts, etc. and any other information which may be attributed to the topic of "Infrastructure (Asset) Management".
The topic evidently has very broad international application, particularly in the Municipal environment, and is accessible through access to the "International Infrastructure Management Manual" (see 'Files' ref) and training is already occurring periodically.
This e-Forum is an informal electronically based group. It had the tacit support of many Institution of Municipal Engineering (SA) members of other professionals and key South African role-players. It is intended to augment initiatives as they are arranged, occur or emerge, to gather and test the market preparedness and interest, and to facilitate application of this new thinking through contact, exchange and networking of all those registering on yahoo groups and joining this e-Forum. The hope is to identify particular further opportunities and to seek, synergise and mobilise the personal champions, organisations, etc.
For example, IMESA has launched it new IIMM - SA Version. IM was titled ‘The next big thing...’ in the July 2001 IMESA magazine. It increasingly features in diverse SA conferences and publications like IMIESA. It is receiving increasing professional, private and public sector attention. A leadership group around Infra_Man is now being formed and this can be found at; http://groups.yahoo.com/group/IAM_LWG/