[Coral-List] Is there data to indicate an electronic ICRS would be valuable?

[Lescinsky, Halard]

While the Carbon footprint and (now) health repercussions of in-person conferences are certainly worth considering, it would be naïve to suggest, without any sort of data, that a teleconference would accomplish the same goals as an in-person conference.  Does anyone have any assessment data that compares the effectiveness of in-person vs electronic conferences?  As a teacher I know that just making something available on-line is very different from someone actively participating and learning.  Electronic chatrooms might be equivalent to the casual brainstorming that occurs over coffee and a Danish, but is there any evidence to suggest that this is true?   The oft repeated mantra is that conferences are primarily for networking (particularly for young scientists).  It might be possible to do this electronically- but does it actually happen?

My more scientific concern about teleconferences, is one that I posted on Coral List several years ago when there was similar discussion about ICRS going electronic.  I think each person keeps current in their particular subfield pretty well, but the real value of an ICRS is the exposure to all the other subfields of coral reef science, the ones we don’t know as well.    The co-mingling of ideas and the updates in areas we haven’t thought much about are the key value (beyond networking) of a big multidisciplinary conference such as ICRS.  An electronic conference would be more like an electronic newspaper, where people tend to only read the stories they immediately connect with.  Sure, the same happens to some extent with multiple concurrent sessions at a big meeting, but the bottom line is that at a physical conference, attendees are stuck there for several days, and just walking around, or getting stuck in a session they hadn’t planned to go to, they are exposed to a breadth of topics they wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

Perhaps scientists would lock themselves in their individual offices and live and breathe reef science of all types for the better part of a week, but I doubt if any of us actually would.  Just because something can be done technologically, doesn’t mean it will have the same value and utility to the attendees.  I’d want some data about how useful an electronic conference would actually be, before scrapping a face to face conference.  Of course if Corona renders a face to face conference impossible, than an electronic option might be better than nothing, but it’s naïve to think such an e-conference would be comparable in value unless robust assessment data suggested otherwise.