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As we prepare for the IASC 2025 conference in Amherst, Massachusetts this summer, we want to offer opportunities for members of our community to meet each other, build relationships, learn about work happening across our network, and find ways to collaborate before, during, and after our time together.
Why you should participate:
Our online hosting team [1] is organizing opportunities for pre-conference engagement in response to requests from many members of our network, including the following:
- Convene with other panelists in advance of the IASC conference, to explore your shared interests, and plan to make the most of our coming time together.
- Meet with other IASC members in your geographic region – from across Africa, Asia, China, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and Oceania – to build relationships and learn about local opportunities for collaboration.
- Explore the thematic areas of focus that are active across the IASC network (e.g., natural resource commons, urban commons, knowledge commons, etc.)
- Identify emerging opportunities for dialogue and collaboration, utilizing our IASC 2025 online engagement space to propose topics of interest and find others who also are interested in that topic.
We believe these discussions can make our time together in June more focused and productive. Then, in the immediate post-conference period, we can use these capacities to support collaboration seeded by the ideas and energies that emerge during our time in Amherst. Longer term, this effort has the potential to create new methods of IASC community engagement that can help our community generate ideas for regional and thematic events on an ongoing basis.
What to expect:
Our team is focused on supporting self-organizing by participants – as an “Open Space” in which you and your peers are able to shape the agenda. Keep watching biweekly IASC newsletters and the news feed on the IASC 2025 conference website for updates. We will be rolling out a suite of online tools in coming weeks to support IASC members connecting with one another during the pre-conference period and beyond:
- A “social system map” to support self-organizing of conversations around common interests and preferred languages.
- A Slack workspace for text-based conversation and coordinating the scheduling of live calls
- Dedicated Zoom lines available to all members
- A calendar for sharing open invitations for dialogue
We want to hear from you!
What would make engaging before the conference worthwhile to you? Are there specific topics you would like to discuss with others? Would you be interested in hosting an online conversation for your region and/or thematic area of interest? Is there anything else you would like to see as an objective for pre-conference engagement? Your input via THIS BRIEF SURVEY would be very much appreciated.
[1] The IASC 2025 online planning subcommittee members: Ben Roberts (chair), Raksha Balakrishna, Greg Bloom, Esther Bravo, Bryan Bruns, Charlie Schweik and Lavanya Suresh.
