New This Year: An Important Change to Proposal Process for Preorganized Sessions at Annual Meeting

For the first time, all preorganized session participants must submit their own information for the 2019 Annual Meeting. In the past, the chairs of preorganized sessions submitted all the information for all the participants; this year, they will only submit information about the session as a whole.

If you are part of a proposed session, we recommend you submit your personal information by March 15. If you are proposing a paper, diamond or media presentation, you should also try to start your submission by March 15, though you will have until March 31 to complete it. You will receive submission ID numbers as part of your proposal confirmation, which you must give to the chair of your session to submit as part of the session proposal.

Chairs of proposed sessions will submit the session information, including the ID numbers collected from each panelist.

We urge all preorganized session panelists to start this process as early as possible, in order to have plenty of time to complete the multiple steps. You only need to create a place holder, by starting the submission, to build the connections between the session and its associated individual submissions. For step-by-step instructions, see Instructions for Submitting Each Type of Proposal. AFS staff is available during business hours to assist with any difficulties, but because of the volume of proposals submitted in the last days of March, staff attention will be quite limited then.

This new process arose from privacy concerns raised by the passage of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which has implications for organizations like AFS. The registration and proposal forms have been revised to provide transparency about how AFS will use the personal data that we collect, and to allow meeting attendees to provide or withhold permission for the use of that data.