It’s time to lock in the dates for next year’s Spring Gathering, so block your calendar for Friday April 12 and Saturday April 13th. The theme will be “Introducing the Future,” which will explore the various approaches, tools, and experiences for introducing the future to people and organizations not familiar with our field.

We will do our usual dinner and social on Friday, have meeting on Saturday, and a party on Saturday night. We have just started working on the agenda, so we’d love to hear your idea for a session. if you have a topic in mind that fits with this year’s theme. Program your apps to find cheap flights and be ready to pounce if you’re coming in from out of town. The Hilton on campus is very convenient (link) and some folks have used AirBnB (link). We think about, practice,  and experiment with how to excite people about engaging with the future. But most of that attention is piecemeal – a little here and there. So we thought it would be useful and fun to focus on how we do it and how we might do it better. All of us have some experience in explaining what we do, perhaps persuading others to try it, or maybe have interesting case studies to share. We are looking for ideas for specific topics we might cover, as well as presenters. So, if you have a topic you’d like to see covered, or even better, if you’d like to present, please let us know (email Andy at ahines@uh.edu).    — Andy Hines