The Croatian Communications and Information Society (CCIS) started its membership in ComSoc’s Sister Society family in 2002. The Agreement between CCIS and ComSoc was signed at Globecom 2002 in Taipeh. It was renewed three years later in Seoul, at Globecom 2005, and the renewal has been repeated every four years regularly. In 2018 the actual Agreement between the CCIS and ComSoc was signed by N. Rozic, CCIS and K. B. Letaief, ComSoc president (coordinated by O. Dobre, director of Sister and Related Societies). Today, we are proud to say that CCIS has spent a really fruitful 15-year period in ComSoc’s Sister Society family, a great reason to continue advancing the collaboration with ComSoc and with other Sister Society members. The information about ComSoc’s Sister Society family and CCIS can be found at: https://www.comsoc.org/membership/sister-related-societies.

The cooperation agreement offers to both sides general benefits including co-sponsoring of conferences, as well as benefits through joint cross promotion, membership and publications. Looking in the past, CCIS in cooperation with ComSoc’s Croatian Chapter has established a very successful cooperation in organizing main conferences in Croatia in the area of ICT, including the International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM), International Conference on Telecommunications (ConTEL), and recently the International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech). The CCIS leaders have regularly participated at SS Summits that are traditionally organized in conjunction with ICC and Globecom conferences presenting the activities of the CCIS. A five-member CCIS group attended the Globecom 2008 conference in New Orleans where the secretary, Carole Swain, organized important contacts and meetings between the CCIS and ComSoc representatives.

CCIS’s main conference, SoftCOM, has been based on the standard yearly application process, technically co-sponsored by ComSoc since 1998. In addition, starting in 2002, the SoftCOM conference has been regularly advertised in ComSoc’s the most popular publication, IEEE Communications Magazine. SoftCOM Conferences have regularly featured keynote and invited talks, often given by recognized ComSoc’s speakers. We are honored to have had an opportunity to host some well recognized ComSoc leaders as keynote speakers, including Sergio Benedetto (SoftCOM 2003), Nim Cheung (SoftCOM 2006), Roberto Saracco (SoftCOM 2007), and others. Besides ComSoc’s leaders, the keynote speaker at SoftCOM 2008 was Elya Joffe, the president of the IEEE EMC Society. Inspiring keynote talks and personal attitude of the mentioned outstanding persons as well as their openness and readiness to communicate with each conference participant have had significant impact on the interest for ComSoc as well as CCIS memberships. The joint CCIS–ComSoc info desk has been regularly organized at SoftCOM conferences. The participants had been offered the samples of ComSoc’s main publications, Conference Calendars, Call for Papers, and Forms for Memberships and subscriptions provided by ComSoc.

In cooperation with the University of Split, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Naval Architecture (FESB), CCIS publishes the Journal of Communications Software and Systems (JCOMSS) since 2005. JCOMSS is published quarterly and focuses on high-quality, internationally peer reviewed papers that advance the state-of-art and applications in communications software engineering and communications systems including new and emerging technologies, methods, algorithms, implementation aspects as well as reports on experiments with performance analysis and prototypes. The journal has been endorsed by ComSoc’s Technical Committee of Communications Software (TCCS) from its beginning. In 2007 a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between ComSoc and CCIS which extended the previous Publications Side Agreement to include ComSoc’s technical co-sponsorship to JCOMSS, and it was renewed in 2012. From the very beginning of the JCOMSS publishing, the policy has inclined to ComSoc’s Transactions standards. The JCOMSS editorial team includes a number of recognized ComSoc members, and reviewers were mostly engaged among members of the IEEE family. Among the authors of the published papers there were several very recognizable names such as Claude Berrou, S. Benedetto, Y. Nemoto, A. Jamalipour, N. Kato, G. Caire, S. Lin, G. Montorsi, F. Chiaraluce, R. Garello, and F. Lattarulo. Last year’s JCOMSS has evolved in an open access journal and is currently indexed in Scopus, EBSCO, Doaj, Google Scholar, and recently is under evaluation by the Clarivate Analytics (former Thompson Reuters) for inclusion in the SCIE/ESCI databases.

CCIS members are active in a number of projects within the ICT industry in Croatia and abroad including Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Zagreb, the Croatian Regulatory Authority for Network Industry (HAKOM), as well as a number of research groups, including the groups from the universities of Milano, Torino, Salento and Perugia, Osaka, Vienna and others. Specifically, collaboration with Ericsson Nikola Tesla is focused to software engineering in practice, the innovative companies aspects, Telco services and IoT, and Ericsson Nikola Tesla Summer Camps. In collaboration with HAKOM, roundtables have been organized on the topic “Development of the Infrastructure for the Broadband Access in the Areas with Insufficient Commercial Interest by using Structure and Investment Funds (ESI).” With universities from Vienna, Zagreb, Budapest and Split, a few Ph.D. forums on the topic of innovations in research as well as workshops on doctoral education in ICT have been organized in past years.

CCIS regularly solicits members, particularly Ph.D. students, to join not only CCIS but also ComSoc so they can easily and preferentially access the most important publications, conference proceedings and other scientific and technical materials.

ComSoc’s Sister Society Publications website is https://www.comsoc.org/membership/sister-related-societies/sister-society-publications, and the JCOMSS home page is available at https://jcomss.fesb.unist.hr/, and the CCIS home page is http://www.ccis.hr/