[ESIP-all] Meeting Venues and Climate Change

[Joe Hourcle]

On Feb 5, 2014, at 12:08 PM, Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102) wrote:

>> On Feb 5, 2014, at 11:56 AM, Erin Robinson <erinrobinson at esipfed.org<mailto:erinrobinson at esipfed.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Bruce,
>> This is something near and dear to my heart.
>> 
>> The entire ESIP meeting is streamed via Webex and available for free. We have done this for the last 6 meetings. We also share our webex capabilities with other agencies to support remote capacity for their meetings too. There is research however that moving entirely virtual all the time is not the silver bullet and there is necessity for in person meetings.
>> 
>> There is always space for continued improvement of hybrid meetings. It would be helpful to discuss this on next Monday's visioneers call.

> I have noticed that if you are just listening/watching, virtual presence can be almost as good as the real thing.  But when you are trying to contribute/participate/present, the impact difference between a disembodied voice and an actual person is quite significant.  Even when the logistics work out perfectly.


Agreed on the listening part ... but I've found that if you have the *right* speaker, they *can* pull off the disembodied voice thing. [1]

I don't have time to find it before my next telecon  ... but there was a study a few years back where they found that having a face-to-face meeting had a significant correlation with the success of the project. [2]

I remember there was another talk on distributed projects (maybe it was the same talk?), and there was a group that found a correlation between distance of the groups & success ... and I pointed out that they can't say it was only distance, as they didn't have any far studies that were in the same time zone (eg, europe & africa or north & south america), and there's good odds that the timezones are a bigger problem than distance).[3]

-Joe


[1] the speaker was Heather Piwowar, giving a talk at last year's RDAP (Research Data Access & Preservation) ... she's always full of energy, and it even carried through over the phone.

[2] I think the person was from U. Michigan, as 'collaboratory' is popping up in my head, and I tend to see that term mostly used by U.Mich folks.

[3] I know that one was an ASIS&T meeting ... I think I had gone to see a talk on an IMLS funded project to develop a modular digital archives curriculum.