organisation
The BOLC has been dormant for a few years, but now that the founder has reached official retirement age, he is "rebooting" the organisation. Richard Gill founded the BOLC on the eve of nurse Lucia de Berk's acquittal in 2006. A group of friends who had been closely associated with the movement to get Lucia a fair retrial decided that they so enjoyed one another's company, and had learnt so much from the experience of the past few years, that they wanted to try out their skills on some new cases. We rapidly ran into some serious problems and temporarily closed down our website, though activities continued on several cases, more experience was gained, a lot was learnt.
We feel it is time to try again, having learnt some useful lessons from our failures of the last few years. Here is a rough outline of our plans.
1. Set up a robust formal structure with an executive board (chairman, secretary, treasurer) and an advisory board. Rather than calling it the scientific advisory board as is common in academic organisations, it should be a moral and/or wisdom advisory board, to be kept informed of our activities and to let us know if they think we are going off the rails.
2. Possibly, make an application to become a foundation ("Stichting"). This means we will also be something like a society or a club, with an annual general meeting. We would have members, who might also like to make donations, since running a web site and occasionally getting into legal trouble costs money.
3. Write about the cases we have been involved in during recent years, in particular: alleged serial killer nurses Ben Geen (UK), Daniela Poggiali (Italy); allegations of scientific misconduct in the case of the PhD thesis of a student of Peter Nijkamp; the case of the AD Herring test and the quality of Dutch New Herring; the case of Kevin Sweeney.