Ok, last week I hope I made a clear point in why it is interesting to devote your life to the ILC. A lot of people have the same view as me, so we are a quite large and growing international community trying to get together the design of this future machine. This is a wonderful fact and we really enjoy the pioneering spirit. And in our pioneering effort we create a lot of meetings to discuss our work. And as this is a truly international effort, of course these meetings are scattered all around the world. If I wanted to attend all of those (and they really deserve it), then I better spend the rest of this year on planes.
Fortunately physicsists have the gift of self-organsiation. It tends to start chaotic, but it comes to order eventually. So finally people recognised that there must be a life outside an aeroplane. And this was a wonderful example where big important lab directors (worried about the travel budgets) and younger researchers (worried about their families) had the same intentions (though different motivations) to limit the inflation of meetings.
An interesting idea under discussion right now is, to define 3 to 4 meeting slots for the ILC community per year rotating around the bigger labs on the world. So whoever wants to organise a meeting knows where and when the next slot is available. The host institute then just offers meeting rooms (and of course coffee!!) and nothing more. The organisation of the meetings and workshops taking place stays in the hands of the people interested in that meeting. And as the meetings then bunch up at one place, there is an excellent chance to have synergy effects between the different groups meeting at that place.
Other interesting concepts of avoiding travel are of course are of course to replace real meeting with virtual meetings, like phone or video conferences. These kinds of meetings could be very effective, but they reach their limits sometimes. Try to organise a phone meeting with Europeans (GMT+0/1), Westcoast-Americans (GMT-8) and Japanese (GMT+8) and you know what I mean….
So what is this with scientists and coffee? And why is there such a rush to the cookies at the conferences?
Kurt
Posted by: Kurt | February 10, 2005 at 10:09 AM