Future Science Café

The 2021 (virtual) meeting of the European Meteorological Society started off with the collaborative Future Science Café inspired by the rapid developments in remote collaboration forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic, we reflected on the sustainability of everyday academic practices and imagined what a future world might look like.

Some of the advantages and drawbacks were quite obvious. Advantages are for example saving on travel, and lower barriers for remote collaboration. The biggest disadvantages were experiences in the social spheres, with disturbed life-work balance and isolation. Importantly, new colleagues suffered from a lack of proper introduction.

Several new ideas and insights came up as well. For example, online lectures sometimes led to increased participation by students. And instead of hybrid conferences, perhaps it is more productive to consider hybrid audiences since the interest of a remote audience is often not served by the traditional conference format and vice versa.

The event was held in gather.town, where five whiteboards were set up in a virtual room. Each whiteboard was tied to a topic. In two rounds, participants gathered around the whiteboards and discussed the corresponding topics. Afterward, the moderators have written a short summary on each of the topics.

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