An important message regarding the International Oat Conference
The following message is from Catherine Howarth and Nick Tinker:
"Dear International Oat Community,
As co-chairs of the International Oat Conference (IOC) Committee, we (Catherine Howarth and Nick Tinker) are reaching out to you to update you and request your input. This will be a long but important message, so we ask you to read it carefully.
First, the next IOC conference, which will be held in Perth, Australia, will likely be delayed until September or October 2022. The IOC will help to select and approve a date. Also, the American Oat Workers are currently approving a plan to move the next AOWC conference to July 2024. Stay tuned!
Since this means there would be more than a 6-year delay in the IOC business meeting, the IOC will hold a virtual meeting, with online voting, in approximately 2-3 weeks. Voting will take place within the executive and the country reps, which are listed here: https://oatnews.org/oatnews_pdfs/2018etc/IOC_Reps_for_Oatnews_2019.pdf
We are currently updating the list of IOC members, as some have retired or become unresponsive. If you are unable to reach your country representative, or you know that they have retired, we would welcome your nomination of someone (including yourself) who can be approved on the first vote at the next business meeting.
Perhaps the most urgent and important vote that the IOC will hold will be to elect a new International Oat Nomenclature committee. This committee has an International mandate to evaluate and approve any new nomenclature related to genes, molecular markers, chromosomes, and possibly other items (e.g. ontologies) and must be responsive to the International community when consulted on such matters. With forthcoming oat reference genomes and pan genomes, and all the “discoveries” that will follow, it will be increasingly important to control the nomenclature of oat. The committee will have up to 9 members, and will self-elect their own chair.
We welcome nominations for this committee, yourself or otherwise, and we ask that you send nominations ASAP using the form in the link below. If more than 9 members are nominated, the IOC will elect 9 members by ranked voting.
The form below will allow you to provide input on any or all of the items above. We ask that you use this form for any input that needs to prepared BEFORE the IOC business meeting. You may also wish to copy your responses to your IOC country representative."
This form will be open for 1 week only:
Thank you in advance for your responses!