 |
| The obligatory Zoom lab meeting screen capture. |
I’ve been
involved with a number of e-activities including giving departmental seminars,
giving a conference talk and helping to organize a weekly on-line seminar
series (Ecology Live). These experiences have led me to think quite a bit about
new opportunities for giving talks and sharing ideas and findings.
One obvious
casualty of COVID-19 restrictions has been conferences -large gatherings are
simply untenable even if some regions are starting to reopen some activities.
Some conferences were simply canceled outright early on while others have
switched to online formats. These e-conferences seem like the best-case
scenario allowing for scientists to share their findings while observing
gathering and travel restrictions. I gave a talk in an organized oral session in
an e-conference and have been contemplating signing up for another. But I have mixed feelings. Let me be clear,
the decision to move to e-format is the best decision for these conferences
that have had to respond to these unprecedented changes, but moving forward are
there other ways to facilitate interaction and communication? To me, the answer
is yes.
The cons of the e-conference:
1. Spontaneous conversations
I don’t
think fitting a traditional conference into an e-format works all that well.
The point of a conference, to me, is more about the random meetings and
discussions with friends and collaborators, rather than the extensive back-to-back
talks, for which I have a rather low limit that I can actively listen to. These sporadic encounters, which often amount
to valuable research outputs and collaborations, are lost in the e-conference.
 |
| A mock debate at the last conference I attended before the pandemic |
2. Child-care
Physical
conferences have become better about providing childcare options for attendees.
But, with e-conferences, the parents stuck at home with children might not have
childcare options, making it difficult to attend whole sessions, and remain
fully focused on the science. Added to this, is that the e-conference format
with multiple concurrent sessions over the whole day is not that convenient for
people at home, even without children.
3. Fees and funding
In my
experience thus far, e-conferences appear to still be limiting attendance with
still rather steep paywalls. The one I spoke in still had substantial fees to
attend even though they were using what appeared to be university Zoom
accounts. I totally understand that there are expenses, but the hefty fees
limit an amazing opportunity to reach a broader audience.
Related to
this, conferences traditionally are quite exclusive. Fees, travel, housing,
visas and immigration all exclude people from different parts of the world,
especially those who don’t have access to the same level of funding as
researchers in North America and Europe. E-conferences can change this, but
they have yet to. More than this, many of us are accustomed to being at
institutions that bring in weekly seminar speakers, and again, people in other
parts of the world have no opportunity to access these.
A route forward?
1. Seminars open for all
Working
with the British Ecological Society to bring the weekly Ecology Live seminar
series has been an incredible experience. Firstly, the BES has been amazingly
supportive of this idea and helping to make it work. More than 3000 people have
registered for this series, and from all over the world. The response from
people has been phenomenal.
The lesson
I take from this experience is that there is a demand for high-quality talks
and that there are numerous colleagues from the global south who jump at the
opportunity to hear from cutting-edge researchers. Many of these people are
excluded from traditional, and likely online, conferences. If we are moving to
an online format, accessibility and inclusion should be a motivating factor.
Obviously,
there are expenses with delivering online content, but costs can be covered in
other ways. Traditional conferences have sponsors and companies advertising
their products in the main halls. These groups can still be engaged and in fact
access to online audiences around the world and in permanent on-demand formats
could be quite attractive to sponsors. We’ve now started including advertisements
on the opening and closing slides of Ecology Live to keep the webinars free to
watch.
2. Freed from time restrictions to conference length
Traditionally conferences are restricted to 3-5 days but switching to an online format means that
societies are no longer subject to a conference structure. Without time
limitations, e-conferences do not have to conform to sessions occurring simultaneously.
By spreading talks over time, perhaps grouping by thematic topic areas,
researchers would be able to attend far more talks than they would normally be
able to in a traditional conference setting. I’d watch four 15-min talks on a specific area every
couple of weeks.
3. A permanent record accessible by all, always
Many ecologists are quite overcome by a deluge of webinars,
zoom meetings, etc. Taking the time to spend days in an e-conference is a
daunting choice. Even if they are unable to watch talks live, conference
organizers could make them permanent, searchable, and linkable. We post the Ecology Live talks to YouTube afterward and some of our earlier seminars have been viewed thousands of times.
There is a general move towards open and transparent science, and free online
talks that are permanently available is another step towards this.
We live in
a world where access to new ideas and hearing about cutting edge research
is divided between the have and have-nots. Despite the limitations of COVID-19,
given some planning, e-conferences can provide a powerful means to connecting
the ecologists across the world, but there might be better ways forward to use
these recent moves to on-line formats to better engage diverse audiences in a
much more inclusive way.
No comments:
Post a Comment