As a small organization of just seven staff, it truly took a village to make NISO Plus 2020 happen, and we are grateful to each and every one who helped make this inaugural conference such a success.
We couldn’t have done it without our:
- 251 attendees — including 89 speakers and moderators
- 29 sponsors — terabyte to bit level
- 10 committee members — program and scholarship
- 16 awardees — Miles Conrad Award, Ann Marie Cunningham Service Award, NISO Fellow, and NISO Plus scholarships
In case you didn’t hear, NISO Plus was a sellout! And one of the main reasons for that was the caliber of the speakers, who we can’t thank enough. Whether or not you attended the conference, you’ll be happy to hear that we are creating an open NISO Plus repository, where everyone will be able to access the presentations, videos, Google doc discussions, and other materials from the event. We’ll share more news about this shortly.
One of our key goals for NISO Plus was to facilitate conversations among attendees about important topics for the information community, and we think we succeeded. The level of engagement throughout the three days of the meeting — from the pre-conference workshop on The Potential and Challenges of Today’s AI, led by Bohyun Kim and opening keynote, The Other I-Word: Infrastructure and the Future of Knowledge, by Amy Brand, to the closing keynote on Questioning the Legitimacy of Data by danah boyd — was fantastic! So much discussion, knowledge sharing, and idea generation — on Twitter as well as in person (272 of you were tweeting about NISO Plus immediately before and during the conference).
Another key goal was to come up with some concrete outputs that NISO can take forward. As Executive Director, Todd Carpenter, noted in his opening remarks, NISO Plus wasn’t just about Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday — it’s about Wednesday (and beyond!). We want our conference to be more than just a talking shop — we want to use the conversations we have there to help shape NISO’s future projects and areas of focus. So NISO Topic Committee members, as well as our staff members, are now working through the Google docs we used to collectively share feedback and ideas from each session, as well as comments on Twitter and elsewhere. We’ll share a summary in a future blog post.
We’re also collecting feedback from attendees about what worked (and what didn’t!), to help shape next year’s event. We were delighted to receive lots of positive comments on the first NISO conference — in person and virtually — but we also know there’s always room for improvement. Again, we’ll be sharing our findings here, along with our plans for future conferences.
Speaking of which… We’re delighted to announce that #NISOPlus21 will take place in Baltimore on February 21-23, 2021. We’ll be building on the enthusiasm from this year’s event, along with the things we learned, to make sure it’s even better than NISO Plus 2020. This will include keeping it relatively small — although we will be moving to a new venue so that we can accommodate more people next year — and continuing to focus on conversations and concrete next steps. So, mark your calendars now, because registration will open in September. Look out for more information here soon!