Dear all

Welcome to all the new members: all participants in the Metaphorum 2026 Conference receive a 1-year membership in Metaphorum. You will be receiving our newsletters with updates on forthcoming webinars, training courses and other news from our members. You can unsubscribe at any time, if you wish.

The 100 years of Stafford Beer’s conference went very well. We had 135 participants from all corners of the world, and they brought an amazing variety of contributions to Beer’s theories and practice.

We launched the Festschrift book, with 15 of the authors who were with us, and the video-documentary that we designed and Boyan Angelov produced with the materials we provided him.

The e-book is now available to download for free on the website: https://staffordbeer100.com/festschrift. If you wish to order a printed copy you can find it in Amazon . And the film is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0WMwPEOqJY

We will be uploading in our YouTube channel recordings from a good sample of talks; and also, we will be producing the Conference proceedings - including speakers’ bios, abstracts, and from speakers who allowed us to do so, their presentations.

We are running a survey among the participants to identify the most popular talks and then to invite the suggested speakers to do them again as a webinar, in our general webinar series. This is because many participants missed several talks - and would appreciate ‘attending’ them later on.

There is still a lot of activity in the community WhatsApp, and we are studying solutions to provide a good technological platform to continue members’ engagement.

A very special thanks to the conference team, including John Waters, Juliana Alves, Ayham Fattoum, Ben Wood, and Igor Perko; and to P P Cardoso, S Harwood, A C Martinez, C Osejo, and I Sabir, for their contributions in designing the program, reviewing abstracts and building the conference website.

To Boyan Angelov, for his lead on copy editing the book, producing the video documentary and building up the digital museum. To all people who have contributed with Tributes to Stafford in the digital Wall.  To those of you who haven’t contributed to the Digital Museum and wish to include their tributes, please do. And to Markus Schwaninger and Jose Perez Rios, for co-editing the Festschrift - as well as to every one of the co-authors of the book.

Finally, to Malek Radwan, Allenna Leonard, Vanilla Beer for co-designing the video-documentary; to all the people who did interviews for it (we are still uploading a few missing ones); to Garrick Filewod for all the filming; to Bruno Vaz for all his support researching and curating the digital archive, and to Melinda Balog for her unfailing attention keeping the lists of participants up to date, setting up everyone as members and resolving innumerable issues in the run up to the conferences.

To our sponsors: Martin Pfiffner, Olivia Malik and Pedram Farschtschian, Cornellius Crane, and Bruno Vaz’ company and all who donated anonymously in our crowd-funding campaign.

Today, Stafford Beer would had been 100 years old. We have made it clear that he is not only well remembered but also, that his musings are still awakening our consciousness and inviting us to continue to building up new ways of surviving and co-existing within our organisations, and with our beloved mother Earth. All the centenary events and results demonstrate that his ideas are still inspiring us and are being creatively taken forward by the new generation!

Angela and Jon