SISR/ISSR Conference News: July 12-15 2021 will be online

Dear all,

We hope you are doing well in these dramatic times of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This email contains important information to all members about the upcoming 36th biannual SISR/ISSR conference in 2021.

As you know, the next ISSR conference was to be held in Taipei in 2021. For a long time, we hoped to stick to our plan. However, the latest developments of the COVID-19 pandemic shows a rise in infections in many countries, stricter travel restrictions and uncertainties about the time of the end of this global pandemic. In collaboration with the chair of the local committee in Taipei Associate Research Fellow/Professor Wei-hsian Chi, the Executive Committee has decided to postpone the conference in Taiwan until 2023. Instead, the ISSR conference July 12-15 2021 will be a fully digital conference.

In our meeting with Wei-Hsian Chi, we discussed the possibility for a hybrid conference in Taiwan. However, this solution posed a number of problematic issues:

  • • A hybrid conference implies that the physical conference must be covered financially, in addition to a digital solution with more extensive IT support. This solution became relatively costly.
  • • In the current situation, it is difficult to estimate the number of members who would actually be able to go to Taiwan. Even if many of desire to do so, hardly anyone are able to make travel plans today. The risk of many “no shows” is therefore high.
  • • The different time zones would make an international hybrid conference difficult to organize.

We are obviously disappointed to postpone the conference in Taiwan. Our priority is to ensure that a meeting in Taiwan is successful as a meeting place for many of us, even at a later date. Besides, having an online conference this summer will allow the majority of ISSR members to meet, share their research and discuss, regardless of the trajectory of the pandemic.

We are currently working on the organizational and technical details of the 2021 digital conference (any suggestion is most welcome, if you have participated in online conferences over the past few months!).

To enable as many of you as possible to participate, we now reopen the Call for Session until December 14th. This gives you the opportunity to:

The call for papers will be opened from January 8th to February 28th 2021.

These are the new deadlines:

  • Opening of new session proposals: November 10th 2020
  • Closing of session proposals:  December 14th 2020
  • Opening of paper submission: January 8th 2021
  • Closing of session proposals: February 28th 2021

In order to participate in the digital conference, you must be a member of the ISSR. There will be a conference fee, which will only cover the costs of the organization of the digital conference. Indeed, digital conferences require increased IT support to plan and arrange the conference, expenses for the use of conference platforms, translation of keynotes, and other technical and organizational expenses. However, we expect the conference fee to be substantially lower than usual.  The treasurer has to develop a new budget to determine the exact fee so please bear with us until we can provide you with an exact amount.

I hope this information will give more clarity for those of you who were concerned about the 2021 SISR/ISSR conference. The Executive Committee will continue to plan the conference in cooperation with the Council, and we will send out information about the conference as soon as possible.

I hope to see all of you at the digital conference in July 2021!

Best wishes,

Inger Furseth
President SISR/ISSR
Professor, University of Oslo
Email: inger.furseth@sosgeo.uio.no