Hello from rainy Seattle!
This email is to follow up on what was discussed at the Dublin SIG meeting and to open a dialogue about next steps.
1) As of today, we have 204 active SIG members! Welcome to everyone who has recently joined us!
2) The consensus at Dublin was that people want to stick with a steering committee for the SIG for now, rather than go to an elected leadership model. I will not be able to attend the New Orleans World Conference and will be transitioning out of my role as SIG chair in 2020. For the time being, Lynn Northrop is sharing some of the responsibilities of the SIG chair but if there are other people interested in taking a more active role in leadership of the SIG going forward, please let us know. Fall is upon us and before you know it, there will be a call for World Conference submissions so we want to be ready!
3) Two members at the SIG meeting offered to help try to develop some sort of newsletter that could be sent out quarterly to SIG members as a way of stimulating more interest and participation. Thanks to Casey Catlin and Alice Loyal for helping us explore how best to do this! If people have ideas that they’d like to see included in such a newsletter, please share them!
4) There was a lot of interest at Dublin in having access to more shared aging-relevant resources. We have an Aging in Context Resources page and it is very easy to add "child pages" to this site to create subfolders for a variety of useful aging resources such as manuscripts, non-proprietary assessment tools, treatment protocols that members are willing to share, etc. I have created a Publications page and added a couple of fascinating articles that came out of a 2018 workshop sponsored by the National Institute on Aging examining the state of knowledge on lucidity in dementia. Unfortunately, once created, files can only be added to a child page by the person who creates them, so anyone who would like to contribute articles to this new page should feel free to forward them to me to add.
5) Another idea that was discussed was whether we could create some sort of video platform so that steering committee meetings could be recorded and saved, allowing people unable to attend in person to view the meeting and make comments. It was suggested that creating a YouTube closed site might be one way of doing this. If anyone has technical expertise and could help us create such a tool, please let us know.
Cheers,
Sue