Hello everyone. Can you believe that the PNI Institute is six years old? To mark the occasion, we have scheduled three special calls on The Future of Participatory Narrative Inquiry and the PNI Institute. They will start in January (after we finish the current series and take our usual December break).

When we started the PNI Institute, I had hoped to create three things:

  1. A lively discussion
  2. A an online peer-reviewed practitioner journal
  3. An annual or biennial online conference, with speakers, panels, working groups, and learning sessions

So far we have had only the discussion part of this vision, in our monthly teleconference calls. On those calls we get anywhere from 3 to 8 people, and we have had some excellent discussions about PNI. But I still want to do the other things. I think they would help to support people who are doing PNI projects.

I believe that the only way we can make the journal and conference happen is by turning the PNI Institute into a member-supported organization. If our members were to contribute annual dues, we could support one or two part-time people whose job it was to support an online forum and organize a journal and a conference. This is what I would like to talk about in our special call series.

In preparation for the special call series, I would like to make a special request of all of our members and interested readers. Please answer these questions about PNI and the PNI Institute in this Google Forms survey. I will be reading and compiling the answers before our January phone call, and we will discuss them then.