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Badge Ribbons & “Birds of a Feather” Sessions at the Conference – Find Your Flock!

Our conferences are the one time of the year when members meet in person. To make it easier to spot people who share your interests, we’re trying some new things at the conference in Norfolk: ribbons for your badges and “Birds of a Feather” sessions.

Ribbons for your Badge

We’ll provide some ribbons to attach to your badge that will make it easy to spot your people when you’re on one of the tours, at meals and other conference events.

We’ve found people who will help organize three “birds of a feather” sessions and so we will have printed ribbons for those flocks:

• Iron and Steel Heritage Forum
• Bridges and Infrastructure
• Industrial Heritage Museums

We have not yet found people to coordinate sessions for other interests so we are also providing blank ribbons and a marker. Take a blank ribbon, write your interest on it, and look for others who share your interest.

We’re also printing two other kinds of ribbons.

• Members of the SIA’s board will wear ribbons that say “Board Member”.
• We are also printing ribbons for people who are attending the conference for the first time. When you see someone wearing a “First time attendee” ribbon, please introduce yourself and help them feel more comfortable.

“Birds of a Feather” Sessions

We hope that bringing people together around shared interests will spur additional activities focused on that interest following the conference. We’re going to have three “Birds of a Feather” sessions that will meet during the Thursday evening Welcome Reception. Around 8pm we’ll encourage each flock to migrate to a meeting place to talk about their interest. Details will be available at the conference.

Note that all sessions are happening in parallel so if you have more than one interest, you’ll need to pick one session to attend.

Goals

If these sessions go well we hope to see some future activities around these interests. Hmm, perhaps we could revive the Historic Bridge Symposium? We would like to make these “birds of a feather” sessions a regular conference activity. If you have suggestions about how to make them better, please let us know.

We look forward to seeing you – in person – in Norfolk.

Martin Johnston, Board Member and chair of the Papers Sessions at the conference

John Mayer, Board Member and co-chair of the SIA’s strategic planning process

Tony Meadow, Board Member and chair of the Iron and Steel Heritage Forum

Ted Grovstad-Nordbrock, Editor of our relaunched referred journal Industrial Heritage