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

Nohora Galvis icri.colombia at gmail.com
Mon Mar 16 19:16:01 UTC 2020


Dear Colleagues,

Months ago, I was talking to ICRS Symposium organizers through the ICRS
Society about the need to evolve ICRS Symposium to an online meeting, if we
teally want to be coherent with diminishing our carbon footprint.  I was
proposing to start video clips of 15 minutes per participant shared by the
Coral List. Authors that way can be contacted with comments and questions
publically.

The effectiveness of online meetings is tacit to diminish CO2 from flights
of >2500 participants. To accomplish the objective of socializing, it is
recommended using virtual meeting software like Zoom (used for webinars).
There are also open-source solutions for running services like Zoom on your
own. Jitsi is one option: https://jitsi.org/, which is actually what powers
the video-conferencing.

Plenaries were agreed to be shared live streaming on social media (e.g.
Facebook or YouTube). Thus, an online ICRS would be valuable !!

El dom, mar 15, 2020 12:55, Lescinsky, Halard via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> escribió:

> 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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