Since the beginning of the pandemic, CNI has sought to evolve its program to find the best balance of synchronous and asynchronous events, and, as in-person events are resuming, the most appropriate choices for in-person as opposed to virtual events. We’ve been listening carefully to feedback from our community, and over the past year we have also become increasingly mindful of the very real constraints on everyone’s time and attention and the importance of recognizing and honoring these constraints. You’ve seen these developments reflected in the evolution of our virtual meetings, the permanent move of our executive roundtables to the virtual environment, and the redesign of our in-person event in December 2021 (including a commitment to comprehensive video documentation). 

Today, we want to share the next step in this evolution. We are eliminating the pre-recorded, asynchronous project briefings that have been featured as part of our spring and fall member meetings in favor of bi-monthly (at least tentatively) asynchronous project briefing collections. Every two months or so we’ll issue a call for asynchronous project briefing proposals and select a maximum of 10-12 of these for release, contextualized by an “edition guide.” The intention is to deliver project briefings throughout the year on a more timely basis, while also avoiding the overwhelming and difficult-to-navigate mass of video material that is arbitrarily released in conjunction with our spring and fall synchronous events. 

 

We expect to issue the call for the initial asynchronous project briefing edition in late January or early February; proposals, acceptance, and release of the collection will be on a fairly short timeline. We are still working out some details and possibilities (for example, the nature of the edition guide, the possibility of including special thematic subsections in some editions, and potential methods for organized interaction with the presenters). There’s no doubt that we’ll be further refining this as we gain experience, but we felt that it was important to share the overall strategy as soon as possible, and particularly prior to the calls for submissions for the Spring 2022 Membership Meeting.

We’d welcome any thoughts about this shift from the CNI community. 

Clifford Lynch

CNI Executive Director

Diane Goldenberg-Hart