[Coral-List] ICRS global vs regional

[Peter Sale]

Hi all,
As usual, Denny Hubbard speaks considerable sense.  There is one thing he left out when talking about the diversity of topics and ideas at a global ICRS.  While we are a global community, we exist as two large sub-communities based in the Caribbean and in Australia, and a series of smaller groups based in France/French Polynesia, south-east Asia, Japan, Hawaii, Red Sea, and Europe (and apologies to all of you vibrant researchers who don't find yourselves in any of those).  Some of these groups can be very insular for reasons to do with language, travel opportunities, size of the group.  The two largest sub-communities have for as long as I can remember shown a tendency to act as if research in their region was the only research that really mattered.  (If you doubt this, look at the references listed in typical articles from these two places).  And, no, I have not done the Google search to back up that claim.  A global meeting that moves from place to place around the world over the years has been one of the things that prevented that tendency from becoming an international embarrassment.

The world is changing, and the extent to which we will be able to travel to global meetings may well become less.  We will need a replacement mechanism to sustain cross-pollination of ideas if we lose global meetings.  Regional meetings, with local participation are unlikely to do that.

Peter Sale
University of Windsor
sale at uwindsor.ca