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

Vassil Zlatarski vzlatarski at gmail.com
Mon Mar 16 02:52:24 UTC 2020


Dear Colleagues,

No questions that the personal collegial contacts are very necessary and
fruitful.  However, the Anthropocene evolution is forcing extremely serious
challenges for in-person Bremen symposium.  Also, the way recent
international coral reef symposiums were conducted posed questions about
their efficiency because many sessions were simultaneous and running
between rooms did not help.  Isn’t it appropriate for the coral reef
collegium to design an International Coral Reef Online Symposium for all
interested specialists from so many diverse discipline and remote areas
from all over the coral world?

Such complex remote symposium will require a new design.  The abstracts
should be published online well before the meeting.  This will enable the
organizers to formulate the themes for discussion and organize panels. The
symposium will not be an event for reporting results, they should be
published in advance, which is presently facilitated by publication online.
The tele-contact will provide opportunity for the necessary live discussion
for which lately there was no time.  The focus should be more on
perspectives and debates, and should stimulate interactions between
biological and geological approaches, and between all discipline and fields
related to coral reefs.  The new format could permit the symposium to
conclude in shorter time.  Please consider the potential effectiveness
(cost, time and environmental).

This is not an easy question but earlier it is faced, better service to
coral reefs could be offered.

Cheers,

Vassil

Vassil Zlatarski

D.Sc. (Biology), Ph.D. (Geology)


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Lescinsky, Halard via Coral-List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
Date: Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 1:57 PM
Subject: [Coral-List] Is there data to indicate an electronic ICRS would be
valuable?
To: Coral -List <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>


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.

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