Volunteers needed to blog at the AIC’s 39th Annual Meeting.

AIC is continually striving to expand access to the stimulating and important content that is presented at our annual meeting. Last year, at the 2010 meeting, we initiated two new “firsts “:

    we had members blogging about talks and workshops (click on the Annual Meeting category on this blog page’s left hand navigation menu

    we hosted all available <a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://(poster presentations )”>http://www.conservation-us.org…e.ViewPage&PageID=1204 online

We received a lot of feedback that this extra information was extremely useful to those who were unable to attend, as well as those who were there, but unable to see everything that they had hoped. We are planning on continuing these services again this year in Philadelphia but we need your help!

If you are attending the upcoming AIC annual meeting in Philadelphia I hope that you will volunteer to blog from the conference on AIC’s soon to be newly relaunched blog. You need not be an experienced blogger nor particularly tech savvy. The WordPress blog format is extremely easy to use and any necessary hand-holding will happily be provided to make you feel comfortable online. There also is no pressure to be particularly witty. Although active tense, first-person and personal style are all encouraged in blog posts (this is a chance to free yourself from the writing constraints of condition reports!), the writing is expected to be more like reporting and professional in tone overall. The goal is for readers to learn more about the talk than they would gain from the abstract. More guidelines and training will be provided for all volunteers.

I am looking for 2-4 people for each specialty group session and general session and 1-2 people per workshop. If you will be attending one of the conference tours we’d love to hear from you too.

Last year our blog saw a huge increase in traffic due to annual meeting posts. We know that many colleagues are looking forward to hearing more about the conference and hope that some of you will volunteer, share your thoughts from the meeting, and take the opportunity to become more comfortable with some of the social networking tools of our present and future! If you are interested in volunteering or hearing more, please contact the e-Editor.