The Newsletter 99 Autumn 2024

Making ICAS 13 a Reality

Erik Jansen

Wow! What a wonderful adventure that was! Organizing ICAS 13 has been one of the most exciting rides of my working life. I got to work together with the best team, in Leiden and Surabaya, for which I am really thankful.

While preparing for ICAS 13, I had not met my colleagues in Surabaya in person until mid-July, two weeks before the start of the event. After only seeing them on screen for so many months, and after all these conversations about Surabaya and the ConFest venues, my anticipation of going to Surabaya had been rising. Finally meeting them in person was fantastic, and experiencing Surabaya in real life suddenly made everything so much more tangible.

In similar fashion, after having had email contact with so many of ICAS 13’s participants, meeting everyone in real life and being able to connect names to faces was great. Especially after seeing things run smoothly and seeing so many happy faces, I realized what we managed to put together over the course of the last year, and I felt really grateful and satisfied.

No doubt that Indonesian hospitality contributed immensely to being able to feel the way I felt, being surrounded by the best team, enjoying the most delicious food – it was my first visit to Indonesia, but definitely not my last!

Fig. 2: Erik Jansen and Abdika Amrullah staffing an information table at ICAS 13.