AIBS Annual Meetings through to 2009
At AIBS, especially when planning our annual meetings, we're always having to keep in mind that we are no one's primary-affiliation society. People don't join AIBS in order to conduct their research or other primary professional activities in their chosen disciplinary speciality--that's the role served by our member societies and by many of our member organizations (listed here). Rather, we're an umbrella organization offering meta-level services and coalition activities for societies and organizations as well as for individuals--that's our mission: "...to advance biological research and education for the welfare of society...to facilitate communication and interactions among biologists, professional biological societies, and biological and other scientific disciplines, as well as to serve and advance the interests of biology in the broader scientific community and in other components of society."
Organizing meetings at AIBS--especially our annual meeting--carries special challenges because no one has to attend an AIBS meeting in the same sense that they have to attend the meeting of their primary society(ies). In the latter case, individuals attend in order to network with their peers in their area of specialization, present research results, look for jobs, look for folks to hire, etc. But in the case of AIBS meetings, the same kind of draw is not there, or at least has not been there since 1998, which marked the 48th and final consecutive year that AIBS held its annual meeting in conjunction with the annual meetings of a number of its member societies. Many readers will remember that those were big meetings with thousands of attendees.
However, by 1999 the member societies with whom we had been meeting had been become sufficiently robust (and the meeting-organizing business had sufficiently changed) that they could head off on their own and hold their own annual meetings. After a year of contemplation (during which the first-ever Presidents' Summit was held), AIBS began holding much smaller, thematically focused annual meetings, always in Washington DC, during the March - May time period. The 2000 meeting was on the theme, not surprisingly, of Challenges for the New Millennium. Subsequent annual meeting themes included: From Biodiversity to Biocomplexity * Evolution: Understanding Life on Earth * Bioethics in a Changing World * Invasive Species: A Search for Solutions * Biodiversity: The Interplay of Science, Valuation, and Policy.
In each case, we employed a program format of sequential plenary lectures by some of the world's top scientists, interspersed with informal discussion sessions plus a poster session. Furthermore, we recorded the lectures to go online for free viewing in the AIBS Virtual Library, which now holds 64 lectures (including those by Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould, from the 2000 meeting), with more scheduled for addition (from the 2006 meeting) within the coming month. Simply put, AIBS annual gatherings and their products since 2000 have had to be as much "event" and "show" as they are "meeting" or "conference" in order to attract people's attention and allow AIBS to execute its mission.
Some of our meetings were judged to be more successful than others, of course. Over the years of our "experiment" so far (n = 6) we have found that the themes that draw best include a good mix of science, public policy, and education components all bearing upon a topical scientific challenge: e.g., evolution, invasive species, and biodiversity valuation. We have also found that the meetings were more successful and better attended when we held them during the work week so as to make it easier for DC-area scientists, educators, and science-policy specialists to attend.
Our plans for the next three years of annual meetings in DC will follow the above format, but with some exciting new twists. In 2007, we will mark our 60th anniversary by meeting from May 14 - 15 in a joint meeting with the Natural Sciences Collection Alliance, an organization with which AIBS has a number of key collaborations. The 2007 meeting will immediately follow, in the same hotel, the May 9 - 13 Conference and General Assembly of the International Union of Biological Sciences. In 2008, we will meet jointly with the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary. And in 2009, we will convene our annual meeting in keeping with AIBS's recent decision to work with other scientific organizations to establish 2009 as the Year of Public Understanding of Science.
In blog postings to come, I'll give more information on the Year of Public Understanding of Science, as well on how in 2004 AIBS's interest in attracting as many educators as possible to its annual meetings led to the creation of the AIBS-led evolution symposium at the annual meeting of the National Association of Biology Teachers each fall.