We will not be having the ISSST2020 conference that we planned. In this brief clip from my interview with Dave Woods (Professor, Ohio State University), I respond to his question about what we will do instead.
I’ve received a number of great suggestions for what we can do to meet the needs of our knowledge network, instead of a symposium.
Our approach will be to leverage ISSST infrastructure to empower leaders in our community to experiment with online, small group (e.g., regional) meetings, special session, and web-based knowledge sharing. Our resources include:
- The people of the Conoscente, including those who submitted contribution abstracts and those who reviewed those abstracts.
- Our video editing and hosting infrastructure, including Zoom for hosting and recording group video conference sessions and our YouTube channel for publishing video knowledge products.
- Our relationships with journal partners, including the J Industrial Ecology, and Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, and Infrastructures, and Environmental Systems & Decisions. where we’ve published special issues from previous proceedings.
- Our web platform at issst.net.
- Our events coordination (Beth Shafer) and digital broadcasting (Ben Creighton) experts.
- Our mailing list, Twitter account, and other communications/publishing platforms.
Given the unprecedented events of 2020, it isn’t possible to predict or know what kinds of knowledge creation, innovation, and sharing activities will appeal to our community–although we might make some good guesses about where to start.
Therefore, we’re going to take advantage of our expertise as scientists and run experiments to disocver more about what works and what doesn’t.
Theme Chairs, Session Chairs, and ISSST alumni are invited to propose an digital or small group event that they hypothesize might serve the needs of our community. I will be delighted to lend the ISSST infrastructure resources in support of their experiment, and share the results with the broader community for modification, innovation, and replication of what succeeds!
Eventually, we will return to an in-real-life symposium. For example, we might invite the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment to partner with us during their Sep 2020 meeting in Madison Wisconsin, or we might do something different. In the meantime, these next 30 days give us an opportunity to learn more about one another, our shared research and education agenda, and build a broader community in a lowe cost and environmentally sustainable fashion.
Please comment below, or email me thomas.seager@conoscente.net to propose your next ISSST2020 experiment.
Sincerely,
Thomas P Seager, PhD
President, Sustainability Conoscente Network
