A happy new year from CIB. We wish a prosperous and successful year ahead, and above all we hope you continue to remain safe and healthy. It is good to see Covid restrictions easing in some parts of the world, even whilst they continue to be strict in others, and fingers crossed that life may return to a (new) normal for most of us within a few months as the vaccination programmes are rolled out.
Our year has started with plenty of positive activity for the secretariat and our Commissions. We have had meetings of the Scientific Committee and Congress Programme Committee for the World Building Congress 2022, and in February they will be issuing the first Calls for Papers. This process is being both centrally managed by our hosts RMIT using Oxford Abstracts’ online package and locally managed by our Commissions which are leading in proposing sessions for the conference and reviewing abstracts and papers for acceptance. I hope you will encourage as many people as possible to submit papers and of course to diarise the dates for late June in Melbourne. At this stage we are planning for a traditional face-to-face conference, actually a hybrid with some sessions open to online participation for those unable to be in Melbourne, but we have a fully-online format as a fallback if Covid-related challenges make face-to-face impossible. We are so grateful to Ron Wakefield and his colleagues at RMIT for their leadership of this most significant event in the CIB calendar, and it is good to get feedback that the preparations are as advanced at this stage as people can remember. Thank you!
Also quick off the mark in 2021 was the committee which oversees our Early Career Researcher network. As reported below, we had 95 people respond to our announcement of this new network in December, and a quick survey of those people confirmed their areas of interest and other useful information. We have scheduled the first three ECR events for 2021 in February and March, these include a ‘Meet the Editor’ webinar jointly with the Programme Committee and Commissions, and an introductory networking event. A reminder that membership of the ECR Network is free of charge, and anyone qualifying under our definition of ‘ECR’ is entitled to complementary Individual Membership of CIB if they are not already employed by a CIB member organisation.
Finally you will see that we have launched a quick monthly survey “CIB Pulse” which is repeated in this newsletter. Each month we would like to get your quick opinions on a pressing matter affecting our members, this time the focus is (inevitably) the impact of Covid and I hope you will take literally just a minute to respond and give us your views so that this can be a meaningful snapshot. I also hope that you will offer some ideas for topics for future months’ surveys, it would be great to get our members’ views on a range of key issues over the year. Please show your support by clicking on the link and answering the quick poll.
With plenty more activity in February and March, including meetings of many of our Commissions, all of our main Committees, and an extra meeting of the Board due to the amount of activity underway, this promises to be a period of high engagement, so I look forward to seeing many of our members online soon, whilst we wait to see when and where we might actually hold our first face-to-face meeting since I became CEO nearly a year ago.
Don Ward, CIB CEO
