From Your Executive Director, November 2021

Greetings colleagues,

Having had a couple of weeks to recover from the mayhem of the Annual Meeting, ASIS&T staff are now settling back in and looking forward to a productive and exciting year.

At the Annual Business Meeting, Brian Detlor covered our many accomplishments this year, and I want to add my thanks for his leadership along with that of the Board in making the past year such a success. In my Annual Business Meeting remarks I covered some of the operational successes of the past year. The video of my remarks is linked below for those that were unable to attend the meeting. The full Business Meeting video can be found HERE.

Many good questions were asked during the meeting and the last 15 minutes of the vide shows those questions and answers. One question remained unanswered at the time of the meeting and that was the intended format of the 2022 Annual Meeting. As many of you know, this year's meeting was presented as a hybrid in-person/virtual event. Every content session during the three days of the meeting was available live on zoom as well as in person. We had presenters all over the world presenting via zoom as well as many in Salt Lake City. While we were delighted, and a bit shocked, that it worked as well as it did, we also discovered that this was a tremendously challenging undertaking with a staff of 5 people. Fortunately, two members stepped up at the last minute to help with running the sessions, so I send a special thanks again to Logan Rath and Pelle Tracey, without whom we would have had to cancel sessions!

Given this experience, the Board discussed plans for the 2022 meeting at its meeting on November 3rd and reached the decision that the 2022 Annual Meeting will be a fully in-person event without remote presenters or attendees. While we recognize that it is difficult, or impossible, for many of you in our global membership to travel to Pittsburgh next year for a meeting, we also recognize that the value in an ASIS&T Annual Meeting comes as much from the hallway conversations and networking that take place as it does from the session content, and that this value can only be imparted in person. For those of you unable to travel to the meeting in Pittsburgh, we invite you to pursue presenting at or attending the ASIS&T 24-hour Global Conference that will take place this coming Spring.

There were some virtual aspects of the meeting that worked well and which we are considering continuing as satellite events to the Annual Meeting. For example, fully virtual workshops work very well, so a SIG or other group interested in presenting a fully-virtual workshop as a satellite to the 2022 Annual Meeting will have the opportunity to do that. Additionally, we felt the virtual posters worked very well, so we are exploring the possibility of having a 2-3 day virtual poster event in conjunction with the meeting as well. Additionally, we do plan to live-stream (via zoom or another platform) the keynotes and Business Meeting. However, these will be available for viewing only without virtual participation options.

More details on the 2022 Annual Meeting will be forthcoming as the planning committee for next year, chaired by Dirk Lewandowski, does its work. We are confident that the event will be a wonderful celebration of togetherness that so many of us have missed. It was such a treat to see 100 of you in person in Salt Lake City and I'm delighted to tell you that we've had no reports of anyone getting sick as a result of attending the meeting.

There are a lot of exciting things happening at ASIS&T and more coming soon. Keep your eyes out for an invitation to apply for a consultant role in the new ASIS&T Consulting LLC endeavor that Brian described in his remarks. We are excited to start making this new service line a reality in the coming year.

Finally, I'd like to thank all of the mebers and volunteers who made the successes of the last year possible. Without you we would not have been able to accomplish all that we have. Additionally, I'd like to thank the ASIS&T staff: Aminta Dawson, Garrett Doherty, Cathy Nash and Pamela Yonker who work tirelessly all year to make it all happen!

Sending my best wishes for a wonderful holiday season.

All the best,
Lydia