Dear colleagues,

You might be seating back, relaxing after a big rush putting your session together. Or you might be spending your Sunday gathering everything together and writing a brilliant abstract that will blow the evaluation committee out of their chairs. Either way, you might be wondering, what after? When will I know if my obviously amazing session was accepted, and by the way, who are these ACPC people judging my proposals? What are my next steps?

Worry no more, here's what you need to know:

You can still help a speaker from your session joining the conference by applying for a free registration via our fresh ideas scheme. Deadline is 23 October.

The Annual Conference Programme Committee (ACPC) will now evaluate all suggested sessions. They will then meet in Brussels for a 3-days meeting, in which they'll debate which sessions to accept, which sessions to leave out, which topics aren't being covered at the Conference, etc.

The outcome of this meeting will be shared with you by mid-December. You'll then be notified if your session was accepted, accepted with conditions or rejected. Those sessions accepted or accepted with conditions will have until 27 January to polish their abstracts, speakers contributions, etc.

On 27 January, sessions will be locked and the Ecsite office will start working on the conference programme that will be launched together with the opening of online registrations: 22 February.

So for now, it's your turn to relax while the ACPC goes through hundreds of submissions and will do their best to select those that you won't want to miss in Porto!

Good luck,

The Ecsite team

By the way, this is the ACPC, who will be evaluating your proposals:

Mikko Myllykoski, Experience Director, Heureka (Vantaa, Finland) - Chairperson
Julie Becker, Communications and Events Manager, Ecsite (Brussels, Belgium)
Ian Brunswick, Programme Manager at the Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland)
Antonia Caola, Head of International Collaborations & PR, MUSE (Trento, Italy)
Carlos Catalão Alves, Board member, Ciência Viva (Lisbon, Portugal)
Maria João Fonseca, Interim Executive Coordinator, Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto (MHNC-UP) (Porto, Portugal)
Hervé Groscarret, Public engagement & exhibitions Manager, Natural History Museum of Geneva (Switzerland) (standing for Jacques Ayer)
Amito Haarhuis, Deputy Director, NEMO Science Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Joanna Kalinowska, Director of Development, Copernicus Science Centre (Warsaw, Poland)
Lorenz Kampschulte, Scientific Coordinator, Kiel Science Outreach Campus (KiSOC) / IPN (Kiel, Germany)
Sheena Laursen, Head of International and Learning Projects, Experimentarium (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Vesna Pajić, Project manager, Ustanova Hisa eksperimentov - The House of Experiments (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Barbara Streicher, Executive Manager, Association Science Center Netzwerk (Vienna, Austria)
Dorothée Vatinel, Curator of the Exhibitions division, Exhibitions projects department, Cité des sciences et de l’industrie (Universcience, Paris, France)
Catherine Franche, Executive Director, Ecsite, Brussels (Belgium)
Maarten Okkersen, Communications Manager, Museon (The Hague, The Netherlands)
Gerlinde Podjaversek, Exhibitions & International Projects, FRida & freD children museum, Graz (Austria)
Vlasta Volak, Director, Techmania (Pilsen, Czech Republic