The call for proposals is CLOSED. Thanks to all who submitted their best ideas for conference sessions. Proposers will hear in early November if their proposal has been accepted.

Timeline

 
Want to help transform the built environment by putting your ideas in front of hundreds of professionals looking to improve their practices? Then submit a session proposal for next year's BuildingEnergy Boston Conference + Trade Show, to be held March 23-24, 2020. The deadline to submit is Tuesday, August 20.

The theme of BuildingEnergy Boston 2020 is Transforming Existing Buildings, with additional emphasis on decarbonization and on bringing more diverse communities into the discussion. We are looking for innovations in the built environment – the practical and the leading-edge, best practices and lessons learned – and paradigm shifts in skills, materials, approaches, design, science, technologies, models, policy, and thinking. In short, we encourage you to propose the ideas and actions that we urgently need to meet the scale of the climate crisis.

While existing buildings will be the content priority, we welcome proposals related to new construction and other topics that would add essential variety to session offerings.

Some particularly interesting topics we would love to see are:

• Tools for electrification of low-income communities and existing neighborhoods
• Post-occupancy data from high-performance buildings
• Methods, techniques, and case studies for deep energy retrofits of existing buildings
• Policy levers, regulations, codes, and incentives that drive high performance buildings
• Design methods and techniques for advanced mechanical systems
• Innovative financing models in action
• Retrocommissioning to bring mechanical systems in old buildings up to or beyond current standards
• Pioneering local and state government and community use cases and stakeholder processes
• Heat pumps for multi-family domestic hot water production
• Monitoring protocol for multifamily Passive House buildings
• Resiliency innovations, particularly current and future climate-smart back-up power options for extended outages
• Operations, maintenance, and enforcement

Areas of Focus

NESEA’s mission is to advance the adoption of sustainable energy practices in the built environment by cultivating a community where practitioners share, collaborate and learn. We envision a built environment in the Northeast that is climate neutral, adaptive and resilient, energy independent, architecturally inspiring, and supportive of connection and community.

Successful proposals will support this mission and vision and relate to one or more of these areas:

About the Review Process

Proposals will be reviewed and vetted by a volunteer NESEA-Member content committee to ensure that conference sessions are data-driven, diverse, and genuinely useful to attendees. Successful proposals:

• Feature sustainable and high-performance building practices, techniques, solutions, and/or governance.
• Present innovative material and ideas.
• Have rich data to support claims.
• Avoid focusing on specific, proprietary products and/or services.
• May describe learning from mistakes as well as from successes.
• May offer a more interactive format beyond simply a lecture and/or slides.
• May be designed for a specific audience and level of expertise.
• Include diverse speakers and panelists.
• Are comprehensive and complete upon submission.

Keep in Mind...

Please keep a few things in mind before you submit a proposal:

• You must be logged in to your nesea.org account to create a proposal (membership is not required to have an account).
• This allows you to save your proposal as a draft and come back to work on it as often as you like before submitting.
• NESEA does not cover travel or lodging expenses for speakers.
• If you would like to work on your proposal as a team before submitting, this document contains a list of the fields you will be asked to fill out once you are logged in to your nesea.org account.

Questions? Contact Susan Farber, Conference Manager, at sfarber@nesea.org or (413) 774-6051 ext. 17.