Communication with communicators...

I had a really relaxing last weekend until on Saturday evening my phone rang and I found myself talking to the husband of Petra Folkerts, the head of the PR office at DESY. Unfortunately Petra got ill and completely lost her voice (that’s why she asked her husband to phone me). Petra was supposed to go to the meeting of the ILC Communicators which took place at CERN on Tuesday and Wednesday. And now she asked whether I could go on her behalf. I was a little bit reluctant because my schedule for this week was quite full. But well, I guess you already know that I really devote myself to the ILC, so I managed to get rid of most of my appointments for the Tuesday and decided to go to CERN for just one day.

So on Tuesday morning I boarded a plane to Frankfurt where I caught a connection flight to Geneva (Hello Lufthansa! Could you PLEASE re-install the direct flights from Hamburg to Geneva? It would really improve research in Europe!!!). So I finally showed up at CERN at around 11:00 to join the ILC Communicators. The Communicators are a group of people devoted to foster and improve communication inside and outside the ILC project. So I was sitting around the table with the heads of the PR offices of Fermilab, SLAC, CERN and some other colleagues especially interested in communication issues. We had a very successful and active meeting, discussing a huge agenda of things related to what has to be done next in the PR and communication business. Central point of our discussions was the implementation of the Global ILC Communication Plan. So we debated vividly about the design of web pages and newsletters, how to get communication on the agenda of the next important conferences, and of course the most pressing topic (at least for the view of most of my colleagues): the design of a common ILC logo.

So we had quite a few examples of logos on the table and liked none of them. The comments were in the range from:'This looks like a logo of a big international logistic company' (which is probably not a too bad description of what the ILC is right now…), to 'Oh, this looks like a set of colliding sex toys'. This comment, by the way, was made by a very distinguished British professor… So the conclusion of this session was, that we should go back to the drawing boards. But we have a quite good idea now about how to proceed.

So after a full day of intense working I flew home, this time via Munich (again, please Lufthansa, do it!) and 17.5 hours after I left my home that morning I was back home.