sustainable-hep: a year on zoom

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by Aaron Held0 views·Updated Jun 15, 2021
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  1. Hi, I'm a Ron.
  2. Thanks for joining.
  3. What I think are very personal reflections about a year
  4. that we have all spent on zoom while it's been
  5. super tough that year, I think that there's a real
  6. upside namely sustainability and now it's our collective and also
  7. each individual person's responsibility to create enough incentive to make
  8. this work long term and just a little bit about
  9. myself to put this into context as we all have.
  10. I've spent a lot of my time in Home Office.
  11. In fact, last week I went back to Imperial College
  12. for the very first time in over a year of
  13. Home Office.
  14. And lucky enough during that time, I've been able to
  15. co organize several online meetings.
  16. This includes established international seminars which have been taking place
  17. since long before the pandemic, but also includes groups, seminars
  18. that were forced to move online.
  19. Several workshops and meetings of different scope and size.
  20. I'm constantly learning.
  21. I think as we all are in this new situation
  22. and I think that's why it's important to exchange ideas
  23. and to discuss.
  24. Um so I hope that we can do that at
  25. some future point.
  26. And now all I have to offer a very personal
  27. view on challenges, advantages and the potential future of online
  28. formats. So here goes the challenges.
  29. I think that the first thing is super important.
  30. The first moment in a call, both a conference or
  31. just your own seminar that you're giving, the first moment
  32. is absolutely decisive.
  33. You have to make a connection to the speaker to
  34. the audience, ask people to turn on their video because
  35. it's just nicer.
  36. Empty zoom tiles are ugly.
  37. That first honest connection is very difficult.
  38. And we all have to, I think put a bit
  39. more effort into that first bit.
  40. The second difficulty is in establishing new scientific networks and
  41. new collaborations, I think if, you know people from before
  42. from real life meetings, that's when things are easy.
  43. But if there's very new people to meet, um somehow
  44. it's difficult.
  45. And two things I think have helped with that one
  46. is using the random breakout room feature on zoom or
  47. any other tool um to implement coffee breaks and just
  48. randomly meet people.
  49. Um, participants of online meetings that I've organized have really
  50. been very, very positive about that.
  51. And I think it's a great opportunity that should be
  52. used. And then the other thing to mention are these,
  53. what you see here have a tall based environments because
  54. then you have the choice of when you want to
  55. talk to whom, in which group of people that makes
  56. interaction much more real life.
  57. and then to 2021 has just been an overwhelming amount
  58. of content.
  59. For me personally, I need to find sort of a
  60. new way of dealing with that.
  61. But I think it's something that we just um are
  62. able to get used to over time and then there's
  63. absolute bright sides.
  64. Um some very obvious ones, some not so obvious ones.
  65. One that's very obvious is geographic inclusivity.
  66. And here you see a map from one of our
  67. meetings where people were asked to put in their location
  68. themselves on that map that arrow down here is a
  69. glitch. But otherwise all the points are real and I
  70. think it's just absolutely amazing that this works and this
  71. is a real upside.
  72. Another obvious upside is accessibility Talks recordings of huge important
  73. conferences are available 24/7 that has received a huge boost.
  74. And I think it's an upside.
  75. Um And then a final upside I think, which might
  76. be surprising to people is that questions during talks after
  77. talks discussion sessions.
  78. I have experienced them as being more interactive simply because
  79. it's a particularly as a young researcher, it's easier to
  80. type in think about what you want to ask or
  81. even interact with an anonymous question form that just creates
  82. more incentive.
  83. And then finally let me reflect a bit about a
  84. post potential post covid future that online meetings can have.
  85. I think we have to ask for each individual purpose,
  86. not just meeting the purpose, whether it should keep going
  87. online or whether it's worth meeting in person.
  88. And I think that fact based things distributing information should
  89. always be taken online while in person human connections, new
  90. collaborations that can justify long term academic visits.
  91. And that means that we have to disentangle this many,
  92. many purposes of online event of events, of conferences and
  93. disentangle them I think into into what can take place
  94. online and what should take place in person and maybe
  95. there's a future in hybrid events.
  96. Thanks