CiA board of directors re-elected in 2021

The nonprofit international CAN in Automation (CiA) users’ and manufacturers’ association hold its annual general assembly in 2021 again as online meeting, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The members re-elected the board of directors as well as the members of the CiA business committee and the CiA technical committee.

CiA member classification

Uwe Koppe (MicroControl) was confirmed as CiA Technical Director and Christian Schlegel (CS Consulting) as CiA Business Director. Holger Zeltwanger is furthermore the CiA Managing Director. The nonprofit organization with about 700 members develops currently the CAN XL specifications, the third generation of CAN data link layer protocols. It also maintains the classic CANopen and CANopen FD specifications. There is also a CAN FD Light specification under development.

The elected members of the CiA Business Committee are Emotas, JanzTec, esd, MicroControl, and Vector. The CiA Technical Committee comprises the following elected members: Emotas, EmSA, esd, HMS, and Bosch. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the CiA marketing activities are limited to online events, this includes the 17th international CAN Conference (iCC) scheduled on June 2021. All technical group meetings take place virtually, too.

The CiA budget 2021 was accepted and will be adjusted to the circumstances caused by the coronavirus. The organization continues to provide services such as answering technical inquiries (service(at)can-cia.org) as well as performing CiA webinars and CiA technology days. It also publishes the CAN Newsletter Online, the CAN Newsletter magazine, and distributes community news by means of email. CiA provides also information on selected social media. CiA tweets (@CANopen) already since some years and uploads videos on its Youtube channel. Since September, CiA posts also on Facebook and Linkedin. Of course, CiA is also active on Wechat (@CANinAutomation), however only in Chinese. Social media has become more important in times of Covid-19 to keep contact with the CAN community.