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Clients · IrisBG Coffee Chats

IrisBG Coffee Chats

Informal video meetings with your peers (and us!). The Coffee Chats are a virtual coffee break for the IrisBG community, where you get the opportunity to share experiences and give each other input.

Get Coffee Chat invitations (opens in a new tab) Browse past Coffee Chats

Coming up

Upcoming Coffee Chats

Register to get the meeting link.

  • From Records to Relevance: Communicating the Value of Living Collections

    Jessica Turner-Skoff, Ph.D. , Longwood Gardens

    How can gardens help people understand the power of living collections? Drawing on Longwood Gardens’ experience, this presentation follows the journey from collections data and horticultural expertise to institutional action and public engagement. Through practical examples, it explores successes, challenges, and lessons for communicating the conservation value of living collections to staff, guests, partners, and broader audiences.

    Speaker: Jessica Turner-Skoff, Ph.D., Associate Director, Science Communications, Longwood Gardens

What happens

A coffee break with the people who do your job

Perhaps you are wondering how to tackle a certain issue, or you have found a smart way to use IrisBG that may benefit others. IrisBG staff are present, so questions to us are also welcome.

Sign up to our newsletter (opens in a new tab) if you would like to receive invitations to our Coffee Chats. We send out a meeting invitation before each one.

Do you have something you want to discuss with your peers at a meeting? Great: send us an email at hello@irisbg.com.

To read recaps and watch recordings of previous Coffee Chats, see the Coffee Chats archive.

Why "Coffee Chat"?

The inspiration comes from the English coffeehouse culture during the Enlightenment.

Just as the coffeehouses once offered an alternate sphere to meet and discuss “matters of mutual concern”, we would like to create a similar arena for you, our community, to meet and discuss smart ways to use IrisBG and to find clever solutions to the problems that arise in the daily work with your collection.

Together we might become a bit wiser. And unlike the good old coffeehouses, we don't discriminate.

Call for presenters

Have something to share? Take the floor

The best Coffee Chats are led by the people who use IrisBG every day. That could be you.

Maybe you are proud of something you have built in IrisBG: a workflow, a label design, a clever way of keeping your records tidy. Maybe you are wrestling with a challenge where the community could help, or you have overcome one and learned something along the way. Either way, your peers would like to hear it, and we get a little wiser together.

You don't need a polished presentation. A few minutes and a good story is plenty. Send us a short proposal and we will help you shape it.

Propose a Coffee Chat topic

From the archive

Catch up on recent Coffee Chats

See all Coffee Chats →

Practical details

How the meetings run

Everything you need to know before joining your first chat.

Length
Meetings are scheduled for 60 minutes unless something else is communicated.
When
We start out with every second Tuesday in the month at 3 pm UTC, but feel free to suggest a time and date that suits you better.
Time zones
Our community spans many different time zones, so we may add meetings to accommodate that.
Format
A chat may have a theme, but in general the format is open and we welcome questions and discussion.
Topics
We encourage you to submit topic suggestions. If a question needs more preparation, we address it in a later chat, in an article, or directly by email.
Recordings
All meetings are recorded, but breakout sessions are not. To inspire participation, we do not share recordings of the discussions in plenum unless otherwise stated.

We also encourage everyone to keep their video on, as it makes these chats friendly and engaging.

For all members of the IrisBG community

Everyone who is a member of the IrisBG community is welcome. If you work or volunteer for a garden or institution with an active subscription, you are automatically a member, with no separate registration needed. We can make exceptions too, so just get in touch if you are interested.

Stay connected

Where else the community meets

The Coffee Chats are the meeting point, but the conversation carries on in a few other places too.

  • Spotlights

    Short profiles of the curators and collections managers behind IrisBG gardens, in their own words.

  • Our users

    The botanical gardens, arboreta, universities and estates you will meet at a Coffee Chat.

  • Testimonials

    Curators and directors on what changed for them after moving their records to IrisBG.

Come to the next Coffee Chat

Subscribe to the newsletter and we'll send you the invitation, or start a free 60-day trial and bring your own questions along.

Get Coffee Chat invitations (opens in a new tab) Start free trial