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A recent gathering of interested island-folk included a conversation about re-invigorating the California Islands Research Coordinating Committee (Council?), or CIRCC. Once upon a time this group met periodically to discuss and partially coordinate various research efforts occurring across the islands. Our pint-plied talk transgressed to many thoughts about how we might address the myriad unmet needs for promoting conservation and research of the multiple island ecosystem, as opposed to the islands as separate systems. These needs include data sharing, across-island data analysis, leveraging multiple management agencies to obtain funding, information distribution, and others. But since there is as yet no formal entity established to promote these ideas, and to get something like that going will require some level of money and commitment that we currently don’t have, one thought is that we start with the CIRCC, which doesn’t require formal incorporation, and could potentially be organized relatively quickly.

So, who’s interested? Send me ideas and I’ll post them here, at least until I figure out how to let people post their own, I guess. I propose that we have a meeting prior to the Symposium in February, so that we don’t simply at that point have another meeting about ‘let’s talk further about organizing something’. To be clear, this would be different than a formal non-profit organization or foundation, something that we’re also interested in. What about some kind of meeting or conference call in November?