The 2021 (virtual) meeting of the European Meteorological Society started off with the collaborative Future Science Cafe. 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.

Visual summary of the future science cafe by Szilard Strenner (grafacity.eu)

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 work-life balance and isolation. Notably, 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. Afterwards, the moderators wrote a short summary on each of the topics.

Layout of the virtual discussion space

Online education

For 1.5 years, education at universities has been mostly online, partly on-campus or in a hybrid format. In this session we reflected on the opportunities that arose due to this quick transformation, but also on the aspects that were really missed.

A big benefit of online education is the accessibility for everyone. Students can log in from their parents’ place, home country, or student room. At Met Offices (such as DWD), digital education means that people do not have to travel all across the country, and can easily chime in for a particular session.

It differs per teaching format if online alternatives are suitable. Lectures work pretty well; if students can pose questions in a chat, it can be even more interactive than in a classroom. Sharing screens is also very useful during practical sessions. However, we miss seeing the faces during classes. Are students bored? Can they follow you? This is what you would notice directly in a live classroom, but you do not see when everyone has their camera turned off and you are in presenting mode.

Teaching from home also revealed the large social component of on-campus education, which is difficult to create online. Going to university is about meeting your fellow students, having an informal chat with the teacher during a break to discuss which courses to follow next, or to ask one more question on the content. During tutorials, students like to check their answer with the neighbour to see if they are on the right track. While tools such as gather.town or spatial.chat can provide some of these informal coffee-moments, it remains a challenge to have informal chats with students in an online setting.

How to move forward as teaching (in the Netherlands at least) is moving ‘back-to-normal’? As much online content is created in the past year, it would be a waste to not benefit from it. However, it is scary to put your material in the great-wide-open (YouTube), especially when you have been recording yourself in home-office settings etc. Nevertheless, the digital content can be used internally in a “flip the classroom” principle, where students study the content in their own time and come to campus for Q&A sessions with the teacher, and to make exercises with fellow students. In this way you re-use the material from last year, and create the social activities on-campus.

Boosted collaboration

The pandemic forced us into online collaboration. While everyone is happy to be able to meet in person again, (know-how of) online possibilities has increased a lot, and maybe it’s here to stay. In the boosted collaboration session, we discussed about the positive and negative aspects of the new online-working regime in terms of collaboration, work efficiency, and work-life balance.

In terms of work environment collaboration, the ability to attend meetings online from different locations has increased meeting flexibility and allowed more people to participate in meetings. The lack of need for a physical meeting space also contributes to increased participation in meetings. In addition, since most of the people are now easily connected through online discussion/working software (i.e. slack), it is much easier to set up quick discussion groups.

One of the participants noted that the online working environment has made it easier and faster to address problems and emergency situations while working from home, because people no longer need to spend the time to commute to the office to deal with the emergency. However, this flexibility can create issues with work-life balance, as people are more likely to work outside the normal working hours. This can result in increased work-related communication throughout the day, which can increase work-related stress. This effect is partly counteracted by the reduced time spend in commuting, which can increase work efficiency and reduce the stress and delays associated with commuting from home to the office and vice versa.

As noted by all the participants the online working environments has created problems for newer colleagues, who do not have an existing collaboration network in place. They find it more difficult to find and communicate with other colleagues as they are often not in the office, where it is easier to spontaneously meet and discuss during coffee or lunch break. This can inhibit both the development of an early career scientist’s collaboration network and the knowledge transfer from the older more experienced colleagues to the younger ones.

In general, it seems that the additional opportunities to collaborate and work online is a double-edged sword. The benefits are clear, but so are the drawbacks, which need to be addressed to allow the online collaboration opportunities to flourish.

Meteorology vs global crisis

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologists, virologists, and vaccine developers have received both high esteem and lots of criticism. What can we, as meteorologists, learn from the pandemic? We discussed the role of meteorology in crisis response, and especially what our strong points are that we could share with other disciplines and governments.

Meteorology is an old discipline — we have literally centuries of experience in measuring and researching the atmosphere. The comment was made that “exchange and cooperation are in our DNA”: from sharing crucial data over slow mediums such as telegraphs in earlier times, to the current rapid share of millions of data points and models through the internet. Exchange of data is normal and expected within meteorology, but might not be as natural for other disciplines (where there might be a certain economical competition for instance). For crisis response, timely sharing of information is crucial, like sharing satellite imagery to emergency services, or outcomes of a model for flooding problems, for instance. In a similar fashion, interdisciplinary is also an important aspect for crisis response that we have plenty of experience with: the current meteorological models started as pure atmospheres, then improved with ocean, biosphere, chemistry etc, all bringing in experts from those fields.

A drawback is that other disciplines (mostly outside of the environmental sciences) can often make use of third-party investments for innovations. Since there is not a whole lot of immediate profit to be gained in meteorology, it often takes a disaster to kickstart (national) investments in early warning systems or climate-proofing cities etc (think of the recent European floods). Perhaps such disasters are needed to kickstart cooperation between parties as well, have everyone around the same table, even though ideally we’d like to prevent situations like that.

More cooperation with policy makers and urban planners is needed to prevent future (urban) disasters: the world is urbanizing and anything that happens in a city can impact thousands of people. Any new urban structuring should involve some form of climate expert to deal with expected climate change and reduce climate risks.

New office concepts

With the pandemic, home office work places became a standard to millions of office workers. The experience quickly revealed that a combination of working from home and working at the employer’s building is preferred by many. This reduces the space required in office buildings, making room for new office concepts and workflows. Skipping the commute also saves time and CO2.

Participants suggested that a 50/50 distribution between office and home office is effective and comfortable. While some people value privacy in their office and a quiet workplace, the social function of office space was missed most in home office — and was only partly replaced by online coffee breaks, depending on the digital skills and flexibility of colleagues.

Most impressive, though, was the “lostness” of new colleagues not properly meeting their other colleagues — and not being properly introduced to them digitally instead. Executive personnel forgot that this introduction doesn’t happen naturally in the halls between the offices anymore. A virtual office twin like we had in gather-town or on similar platforms like spatial.chat could provide a place to hang out and be available for colleagues if necessary, without being in formal video conferences all the time.

The new office concept at Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) was generally met with positive interest. It is optimized for a hybrid concept of office and home office, with bookable offices, and more and flexible meeting spaces (large kitchen, large and small offices, more meeting rooms in smaller sizes). While some people prefer their own classic office space, most people could imagine booking offices flexibly upon needs and stowing their personal things in a rolling office container.

Hybrid conferences

After more than a year of virtual conferences, scientists are looking forward to meeting in person again. But we have also seen (and to some extent, grown accustomed to) the advantages of online meetings and conferences. How can we get the best of both worlds?

We discussed advantages and disadvantages of both on-site and virtual conferences. Interestingly, most advantages also translated into drawbacks. For example, participants generally appreciated the increased accessibility of an online conference, but they disliked the reduced commitment from participants. Similarly, they were happy with the reduced travel, but they missed seeing new places and tasting new beers.

It thus appears that a hybrid conference as a “somewhere-in-between” will not be able to meet the needs of all participants. Instead, it might be more effective to target different types of audiences with the on-site and online components: the on-site meeting will then be optimized for dedication, whereas the online counterpart will accommodate broad but occasional, perhaps even asynchronous, accessibility.

While there are examples where hybrid conferences work very well (think TED), this puts an additional burden on the organizers, “as if you’re organizing two events instead of one”. Perhaps a more gradual transition would enable us to build up experience while keeping things manageable. We could start, for example, by streaming only the keynotes, and making recordings available after the event.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a sudden overhaul in our daily routines. Evidently, change is often triggered or accelerated by emergencies, even if the precursors might have been lingering around for some time already.

The future science cafe was an opportunity to reflect on the status quo and take agency of where we are headed as a field. This year’s theme was mostly around remote collaboration in one way or another. But there are more meta-topics that would make for an interesting future science cafe. Think of open science, reviewing procedures, academic career paths, et cetera.

The annual meeting of the EMS seems to be a good place for such contemplations, and we are thinking about making this a recurring event. So thanks to all participants, and hope to see you next year!

Thanks to Imme Benedict, Arjan Droste, Hella Riede, and Aristofanis Tsiringakis for moderating the discussions and to Szilard Strenner (grafacity.eu) for the visual impression.