Preparing Your Time Portal Session Proposal for AAM2020

Posted on Sep 3, 2019

The high point of my year may well be reading the session proposals you all submit for the Time Portal track at the AAM 2020 conference!

These sessions will take place in some specific future, with presenters speaking from the perspective of someone working in that year and discussing “current” challenges, innovations, and museum practices. The result will be that attendees in San Francisco next spring can spend all or part of the conference exploring the future of museums through these immersive sessions.

For example, one session, set in the year 2100, might share the stories of museums helping communities disrupted or displaced by climate change. Another might present a moderated conversation with two members of the 135^th Congress (2037-2039 session), about government’s role in supporting US museums. I hope some museum educators tell us how kids are going to school in museums in 2040, and evaluation staff share the latest tips for tweaking the performance of your museum’s biometric monitoring system. You can create a session that reflects the world as you hope it will be for your children or grandchildren…or you can go dark and scare the pants off your colleagues with a story based on things you hope will never happen. (But we all know they could.)

Read the original call for proposals here, and access a recording of the Zoom session I gave last week to explain the proposal process. I’ve embedded the slides from the Zoom presentation below (hit “play” and they advance one per 15 seconds), and you can download the PPT in PDF form here.

Some key points to call out:

Use this Time Portal Session Proposal Form to submit your proposal, rather than using the main session proposal form, and email it to me at emerritt (at) aam-us (dot) org, with “Time Portal Session” in the subject line.
Proposals are due September 23.
I’m happy to correspond with you about your ideas as you work on your proposal (see email above).

If you need help recruiting people interested in playing the parts of your panelists in this future, feel free to submit the idea and we can recruit additional people later. (Also, I’ll be starting a discussion thread on Museum Junction to help people connect with folks interested in collaborating on a session.)

I know your sessions will be fun AND inspiring. Show me what you’ve got.