Dear colleagues,

It’s been quite a year. We hope you are all at least getting a break now or soon. We in the UK have been negotiating hard with Reality for some time and despite Reality’s intransigence have some progress to report – not about Brexit or COVID, but about the Biennial Threshold Concepts conference next year (we all have our limits).

In summary, these are our intentions, and only minor variations will occur from the following plan:

Timing and format

• The conference will go ahead, fully online, within the planned timeframe of Wednesday 7th, 9am-Friday 9th July 2021 1pm (BST). It may well run over 24 or 36 hours but it will be within those times which we hope you can keep marked out in your diaries. The final schedule will depend on the second submission window and will be confirmed late May.
• It is likely to run as a ‘long thin’ format with a single or (maximum) two parallel threads rather than multiple parallel sessions.
• We will do our absolute utmost to permit presenters delivering within normal working hours for their timezone.
• Sessions will be recorded and made available online in due course following the conference (there may be processing and editing time required). We hope to use the blog to enable presenters to engage asynchronously and as an ongoing record of their session.
• We do hope to distribute keynotes at intervals that mean everyone can take part in at least one without going outside normal hours for them (final decisions depend on the distribution of participants across the world).

Fees

• There will still be a fee for the conference to cover costs of software, support staff and the like. This fee will be very much reduced from the original fee (which we are still holding for many of you). We expect to offer refunds to anyone who booked for the original conference early in the new term (we do not yet know if we have the facility to offer partial refunds, or we will need to ask you to rebook after refund – please expect an email to you directly on this rather than contacting us). The original waivers for PGTAs and similar will be carried over.

New window for submissions

• We will carry over all existing submissions from the round that closed in December 2019; we will open a new call for papers in January, with the deadline likely to be late April.

Please wait for further info

Some details are beyond our reach right now so we probably can’t answer them yet; obviously, you may have questions in response to this news but the SG have downed tools for a rest over Xmas and we will not be answering queries until around 7th January.

We hope you’re all doing ok in difficult and strange times.

Some background

We have been waiting to see if there is any clarity emerging about next July and have taken the decision to go fully online now, even though vaccines are rolling out. This is essentially so you can plan for the event without guesswork.

It may be that in July, we have banished COVID. But even if we made that (risky) assumption, there is the extra twist that the UK has backed itself into the strangest of corners with regard to travel and none of us would be surprised if this disruption carried on until well into the autumn and beyond.

More importantly for taking decisions, booking hotels and flight is a very strange business at the best of times, where prices can fluctuate horribly even within a few days, and participants need to be able to plan. We also know that funding has become very difficult as university funds have been diverted to other urgencies and many had funds frozen.

More details about all these will be posted in the new year. We will directly email everyone who has had a paper accepted and (separately) anyone who has booked –if you fall into either of those groups, you don’t need to do anything to keep up to date. We will also open the conference booking more widely as soon as we’ve sorted out the existing fees (it never actually went public because of COVID).