Dear Core,
We have three big announcements to share with you! There is much important information in this email, so some of you will likely have questions. Therefore, we have setup a few “office hours” in which you are welcome to dial in with suggestions, comments or to request clarifications:
Office hours:
December 10 – 10:30am ET / 4:30pm CET | Zoom link
December 12 – 10:30am ET / 4:30pm CET | Zoom link
December 17 – 10:30am ET / 4:30pm CET | Zoom link
Save the date: YSI Plenary 2020
The next YSI Plenary will take place on 22-26 September 2020 at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary! As you remember, CEU hosted the first YSI plenary in 2016, and we are proud to return again to #standwithCEU in a challenging time, in which its academic freedom has come under attack.
The plenary will mark the end of a lengthy process started at the 2016 plenary of maturing YSI’s governance structures and bringing YSI to every region of the world through our regional convenings.
Every large YSI gathering has focussed on big picture issues, and grand societal challenges that transcend the scope of most working groups. Part of the plenary will be spent discussing, debating, and organizing ourselves to define which questions we as new economic thinkers (and the discipline more broadly) should be asking in the 21st century. We will launch an update to the YSI website which will allow us to attach these high level questions more directly with our work. We will be involving you in its creation.
We invite all of you to attend the plenary. To offset some of your travel costs, there will be several ways to apply for travel stipends. Although the application forms will not open until late January, we can already let you know that you will be able to apply in the following ways:
- With a report of a YSI project you have done, or a project you are currently doing
- With a working paper that you wrote in collaboration with someone in YSI
- With a question and an essay motivating why your question deserves asking
In the meantime, we’d love your input on which keynotes to invite! If you’d like to make a suggestion please enter the person’s name into this list. We look forward to hearing from you.
More details to follow, and please save the date!
Website Updates Launched – new project approval process
Earlier today, we launched several improvements to the YSI site. Projects have a new look, and now have their directory, in which we display and search all projects. Furthermore, there has been an improvement to the project creation flow which brings it in line with the YSI Standard of Operations, which states that coordinators approve the content of projects.
This means that going forward, it will be coordinators — and not YSI management — who approve the content of new projects in their working group on the website. Organizers can submit project ideas to the coordinator, who can then initialize feasible project ideas.
For the current update, we have not fully realized the approval flow in which coordinators approve content, and YSI Management approves the budget. In this temporary solution, projects that require a budget will continue to be approved by YSI management. In a future update, we will introduce separate approval flows for the project and its budget, so coordinators will review the project content, and management will approve budgets separately.
The update is already live on the site, go ahead and try it out! This new procedure of course creates a responsibility for coordinators to reply to project suggestions in a timely fashion. We expect and appreciate that you will take this new role for coordinators seriously.
For coordinators
Until now, organizers were expected to discuss their project ideas with you over email, or in-person, before turning them into a project on the platform. Projects were then looked over by management before going public. The new flow handles this differently.
- First, organizers submit project IDEAS to you via the platform. Ideas are basically just a short motivation for a project. You will receive an email that a new project idea has been submitted and that you need to review it.
- As a coordinator, you will review whether this project idea is a fit for YSI; make sure to consider that the project:
- is a fit for the participating Working Group(s)
- Is aligned with YSI's values
- Builds capacity within the working group(s)
- Advances new economic thinking
- Respects the YSI principles of non-advocacy and individual authorship.
- You can create the project in the system, which notifies the organizer to fill in all the details.
- If the project does not require funding, you will also be asked to double-check the project page for quality and completion before it goes live.
- If the project does require funding, management will review the budget, and double-check the project page for quality and completion before it goes live.
For organizers
If you have a project idea, the steps to realize it are now the following:
- Go to the “start a project” portal, and submit your rough idea to the working group coordinators to see what they think.
- The coordinator may give you feedback, and if your project is a good fit, create a place for it on the platform. This means you’re able to populate it with all the details.
- After you’ve set it all up, you’ll submit the project to the coordinator, who will help you double-check that it is ready for the public eye. If your project contains a budget, this step will be completed by the management team.
Coordinator Replacement Process
In the upcoming months, we are also conducting our first comprehensive and transparent coordinator replacement process following the YSI Standard of Operations. Nearly all working groups will have open positions for which we seek applications from the community, as long-serving coordinators will start stepping back. We particularly encourage existing YSI organizers to apply for coordinator positions. New coordinators will be nominated midway through next year, and subsequently serve a 2 year term.
For more detail the process and timeline, please go here, and stay tuned for more information.
Thank you all!
Best, YSI Management