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

Wed Mar 18 21:44:49 UTC 2020

All:

This is a difficult topic to get "right" as there are so many different
perspectives involved. As one of the "older" participants, I can still
remember my first symposium in Miami. It was a much smaller meeting back
then and I will never forget being able to go to a talk about reef
drilling, then run across the hall to a talk on parrotfish, then others on
seagrass, marine chemistry.... in the first morning. To be cliché, it was
like being a kid in a candy store.

As the meetings grew larger, it became harder to just "go across the hall"
to learn about things I just wanted to know more about. My sense is that
regional meetings will still be large by comparison to many others. At the
same time, I fear that they will be narrower in topical diversity. At the
meeting in Hawaii, I stumbled into the wrong room. As it turned out, this
was the most important talk at the meeting for me. I am not advocating this
approach to choosing a session, but the diversity of topics that turned
this error into a tremendous positive is the essence of the reef symposium.
I feel that this topical diversity would be compromised in regional
meetings because the narrower interests of the organizers and the limits
that a smaller size will place on how many sessions (and topics) can be
considered.

My fascination with reef science has always been related to its unique
ability to bring together scientists with disparate interests and
experiences. I have always felt that this is one of the most valuable
elements of the Reef Symposium relative to any other meeting I have ever
attended. I can say with some certainty that the most valuable learning
experiences I have had came from talking with people outside of my central
area of interest. From my perspective, while I do enjoy catching up with
old friends and colleagues, the real value of the symposium is the ability
to have meaningful discussions with people I didn't even know existed. -
and on topics not closely aligned with my discipline. This will be
significantly compromised by regional meetings and will all but disappear
with remote meetings.

So, any decision will ultimately make comes down to how much we value the
factors related to one large  meeting versus the environmental gains of
regional meetings to reduce travel distances - or video meetings that
eliminate it altogether. I would argue that if we are going to go to
digital meetings, we might as well invest those efforts into increasing the
topical diversity and integration within the society journal and eliminate
meetings altogether.

Having said this, I remain concerned about the lack of balance in the
Society journal. I feel that the strength of the Society is in its
diversity (cultural and disciplinary). In my opinion, regional meetings
have historically reduced both. So, what do we do? Let's do our best to
quantify the carbon footprint of one global meeting every four years versus
some number of local ones held every year (or every four years). Then,
let's try to predict whether regional meetings would equate to more
topically constrained meetings (I can't imagine this to not be the case,
but... we are scientists). Finally, we need to decide whether the present
every-four-year meeting increases the diversity of thought and perspective
over the entire society than having regional meetings. The strength o the
Society has traditionally been in its diversity of thought and the bringing
together of reef workers with different backgrounds and perspectives. My
experience is that regional meetings have always compromised this.

If we are really going to treat this as a scientific question, we should be
balancing the value (in carbon) of maintaining interdisciplinary scientific
perspectives as they relate to important socio-political issues against the
environmental costs (in carbon) associated with not having the meeting to
share ideas, scientific results and perspectives. Unfortunately, I doubt we
could define a metric to do this that anyone would agree on.

Best,

Dennis

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 12:09 PM Nohora Galvis via Coral-List <
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> wrote:

> 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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> >
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-- 
Dennis Hubbard
Chair, Dept of Geology-Oberlin College Oberlin OH 44074
(440) 775-8346

* "When you get on the wrong train.... every stop is the wrong stop"*
 Benjamin Stein: "*Ludes, A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream*"