Did I Hear that AIBS is Changing its Annual Meeting Format?

 Home | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Yes, you did. At its Spring meeting on 17 May 2009, the AIBS Board of Directors passed the following resolution:

In view of the changing times, the Board directs that the Annual Meeting be discontinued in its current format and transformed to meet the needs of the membership and utilize evolving communication technologies.


So the meeting format of two-days in the Spring in Washington DC that we've followed for the last ten years, which was itself a change from the previous format of larger multi-society meetings that we'd followed for almost 50 years, will be revised starting in 2010, when we'll launch an annual program of strategically timed, topic-specific, half-day events -- typically with three or four speakers -- in person and online via webinar in DC and elsewhere over the course of the year. The AIBS membership will be polled for comments on the new meeting format, and details will be announced later in 2009.

These new meetings will aim to capitalize on AIBS's unique status as a meta-level organization created to give biologists a collaborative voice and influence on the national scene. The meetings will coordinate with and build upon AIBS programs in public policy, research, education, publication in BioScience or ActionBioscience.org, and other areas of AIBS Board, staff, and member activity. They will provide networking opportunities for members with fellow scientists and decision-makers from other fields that small gatherings can do more effectively. And in each case, as much of their content as possible will be online, both as archived recordings and as real-time interactive webinars.

2010 AIBS President Joe Travis has expressed the new meeting concept nicely with the following note to his fellow AIBS Board members:

"A key component of success for [this annual program] of 1/2 day meetings is timeliness of topic. Sometimes timeliness of topic is determined by events -- a push for integrated environmental/climate research by the new administration might make a meeting on good examples of that kind of research or a meeting focused on emerging challenges of integrated research very timely.

"Sometimes timeliness might be determined by events unfolding "within science" -- a meeting focused on an emerging horizon of biology with clear implications for policy or education. We could even, say, join with the National Association of Biology Teachers for a conference about learning in science and what real research on learning is revealing, which was a theme of Bruce Alberts' recent talk at the 2009 AIBS annual meeting, "Why Redefining Science Education is the Key to Enhancing the Public Understanding of Science". This would argue that some meetings can be planned long in advance but perhaps others would be convened reasonably quickly in response to external or internal events."

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://publish.aibs.org/mt-tb.cgi/4816

Leave a comment