I wanted to share some preliminary details of the CNI Virtual Spring 2021 Meeting for your calendar planning purposes. I expect to be able to offer considerably more detail, including dates for registration, executive roundtable participation proposals, breakout proposals and the like around the week of January 4, 2021.

For Spring 2021, largely in response to feedback from the last two meetings and other conversations with members of our community, we are going to a much more compact synchronous meeting format. We expect that the vast majority of the breakout sessions will be pre-recorded and viewable on demand by meeting participants (and subsequently publicly available). We expect that virtually all of the synchronous breakouts and plenary sessions will also be recorded for later viewing and public distribution.

Here's the rough schedule. All times are EASTERN.

March 15-16, noon-5pm: A small number (5-6) of synchronous (live) project briefings, spread across the two days.

March 17, 18, 19 noon-230pm:  Executive Roundtables by invitation. The topic will be Post-Pandemic Strategic Planning Challenges and Approaches.  We'll schedule at least one of these on the 18th; we will schedule additional sessions on 17 and 19 as demand justifies. I will provide a summary of what we heard as a presentation during the plenary session days (see below).

March 17, 18 and possibly 19, 3-4pm invited topical panels, which I'll moderate. This is a new experiment; more on it in January 2021.

March 22-23: unscheduled; a chance to explore some of the pre-recorded sessions, if you wish.

March 24-26 noon-5pm: Plenary sessions; we expect to have a total of about 8-9 invited synchronous plenary sessions across the three days.

With best wishes for the remainder of the holidays and for the New Year

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI