The Forum: what’s happening 2011-12

The New Optimists Forum 2011-12 is a series of facilitated meetings among scientists, plus a few others under the banner title of Food & Cities: Birmingham 2050. (For background info about that, see here.)

You can read frequent updates about what’s happening through our blog here.

Below is a diagram illustrating the plan for 2011-12:

The Forum is an evolving process, the outputs from one event informs the next. The diagram above was drawn up in November 2011 at the start of things, hence the question marks in various places.

And here’s who’s who and who’s doing what:

• I (Kate Cooper) am directing the whole shebang, designing what’s what along the way with the help of others, and making sure things happen on time and to budget.
• We’ll carefully record the conversations through a variety of media, including live social media reporting with the help of Podnosh’s Nick Booth.
• We’ll also be keeping note on the conversations this social media engagement generates.
• Nicci MacLeod of Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics will be analysing the conversations; at this stage we have no idea what this will generate, but we’re pretty sure it’ll provide insights we wouldn’t get without it.
• Frances O’Brien (WBS) and Maureen Meadows (OUBS) are advising on the scenario planning process — we need do what we say we’re going to do, and their job is to keep us to it.
• Ellie Richards, among others, has the task of collating and categorising the outputs we’re generating under the guidance of Frances and Maureen.