[ESIP-all] Meeting Venues and Climate Change

[David Arctur [OGC]]

This issue should certainly help drive increased usage and improvements of bandwidth and presence in virtual meeting technology. But there's an intangible need and benefits from periodic personal contact with distant colleagues, say once a year at least. Informal connections and networking outside the formal meetings can be equally if not more important than the work done in the formal meetings, and these almost can't happen in virtual meetings.  

We need to balance moral responsibility to the environment against the value of personal contact. 

dka

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On Feb 5, 2014, at 10:46 AM, Christopher Lenhardt <clenhardt at renci.org> wrote:

Bruce:

Good points.

However, a couple of things to note.  As I understand it the use of ESIP virtual presence for our meetings has been steadily increasing. Almost every session during the meetings is either webcast, or has a web conference active during the session.

We also tried a few years ago offering folks the opportunity to purchase carbon offsets when they registered for a meeting.  To my knowledge no one, or almost no one, took advantage of them. Presumably the issue was how would this be reimbursed on an expense report!

—Chris


From: Bruce Barkstrom <brbarkstrom at gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2014 at 11:32 AM
To: "esip-all at lists.esipfed.org" <esip-all at lists.esipfed.org>
Subject: [ESIP-all] Meeting Venues and Climate Change

Maybe we need to consider the "moral challenge of climate change" when planning our
meetings.  There's a real challenge in the Slate article

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/02/why_a_meteorologist_took_the_bus_for_28_hours_instead_of_flying.html?wpisrc=hpsponsoredd2

Perhaps it would be appropriate for ESIP to work on ways of improving our virtual
meeting capabilities to cut down on travel.  I don't know whether agencies would consider
converting travel funds to improved virtual meeting capability.

Bruce B.

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