Based on the current public health situation, it’s clear that we must reluctantly move the December 2020 CNI Member Meeting virtual. I wish we could meet in person, but this is not going to be feasible, and I look forward to the time when can gather in person again, hopefully in 2021.
We have designed a virtual meeting for this fall building on what we (and many other organizations) have learned since we led many of our peer organizations in March 2020 by making a very late shift online for our spring member meeting. You’ll note that we’ve already moved to a more flexible schedule for our overall program, taking advantage of the online environment to offer a number of events over the course of the summer and early fall, notably additional Executive Roundtables, the series on digital scholarship planning hosted by Associate Director Emerita Joan Lippincott, and our new Hallway Conversations and Lobby Encounters series. In this message, I want to briefly outline our plans for the fall virtual meeting.
I ask that you continue to hold the original dates of our in-person meeting: December 14, 3:00-5:00pm EST and December 15, 1:00-5:00pm EST for plenaries (including my own) and other special programming. We will announce detailed scheduling for these days later. We’ll hold our December 2020 Executive Roundtable on December 14, noon-2:30pm EST, and if there is enough demand for additional roundtable sessions on this Roundtable topic, we’ll schedule these on December 16 (and, if necessary, on December 17). We will announce a topic and issue a call for participation around October 10 for the December Executive Roundtable. Note that, as we did in the spring, we may offer additional Executive Roundtable convenings in November 2020 (on a topic distinct from the December set) if events and the development of our programmatic work warrants – Executive Roundtables are now a year-round option, which we want to feel free to exploit as appropriate.
In the weeks leading up to the December dates, we will schedule four weeks of thematically organized project briefings. Basically, these will run from Tuesday to Friday each week, with a session on the following Monday to synthesize and reflect on what we heard the week before. This schedule will allow Monday participants the opportunity to watch session recordings from the preceding week if they wish. There are, of course, some adjustments to accommodate holidays during this period, notably skipping most of the week of November 24 for Thanksgiving. We’ll typically schedule sessions during the 1:00-5:00pm EST window. Here is the rough schedule:
• Week 1: Content (corresponding to the first of our program plan themes, https://www.cni.org/program). Briefings 11/10-11/13; summary session 11/16.
• Week 2: Organizations and Professions (corresponding to the second of our program plan themes, https://www.cni.org/program). Briefings 11/17-11/20; summary session 11/23.
• Week 3: Technology, Standards and Infrastructure (corresponding our third program plan theme, https://www.cni.org/program). Briefings 12/1-12/4; summary session 12/7.
• Week 4: Emerging Issues and Developments Related to the Current Crisis. Briefings 12/8-12/10 (sessions will end by 3:00pm EST on 12/10 due to Hanukkah). There will be no summary session for this week.
We will issue a call for project briefing proposals around September 29; we expect to close submissions for each week about three weeks in advance, with notification of acceptance about two weeks in advance. We will offer both 30 and 60-minute slots (details will be in the announcement) plus the opportunity to pre-record shorter project updates for asynchronous delivery. This should ensure very timely sessions; we have always worked on a very short timeline, but the virtual environment allows us to do even better in this regard! The call for proposals will include precise dates for everything.
Invitations to participate in the fall events will be sent out to member representatives and guests around the end of September.
We expect to make recordings of all of the sessions, except those project briefings where the speakers don’t want to be recorded, available to the public. Zoom allows us to do this quite rapidly.
Please feel free to reach out to me or to our assistant director, Diane Goldenberg-Hart ( diane@cni.org), if you have any questions on this. I hope that many of you will be able to participate in these virtual events. As always, I am grateful for your support and engagement.
Clifford Lynch Director, CNI
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