Moving a workshop online: what works and what doesn’t?

Open Knowledge Infrastructures in Times of the Pandemic: My first year with COPIM

“…Not wanting to lose momentum in the project, and realising that we were likely to be restricted from physical gatherings for some time, we decided to experiment with holding the workshop online. (Barnes, 2020) Looking back on these lines one year later, I'm still astonished at the fact that, as a team, we managed to adapt to the pandemic and corresponding fundamental challenges to COPIM's short-and long-term prospects 5 in the way we did. Thanks to the flexibility and openness of all involved to new approaches of working togetherwhich also extends to the larger network of stakeholders and groups of participants that took part in our workshops and further collaborations -we managed to pivot from an initial focus on in-person interaction to online-only workshops with stakeholders across a wide topical range at a time when the large-scale Zoomification of events and corresponding side effects such as emergent privacy issues regarding the now-prevalent dependency of institutions across the globe on infrastructure provided by a private, for-profit business, 6 or the psychological impact of day-to-day video conferencing as encapsulated in the term Zoom fatigue (see Bailenson, 2021), hadn't been as all-encompassing as they appear to be now, one year into the pandemic, in March 2021.…”

Are Safe Social Practices on the Horizon?

“…Countries need to reduce their ‘emissions by 80 percent by 2050 through a combination of steps: (1) energy efficiency gains, both in electricity generation and use and in transportation, including fuel-efficient vehicles; (2) renewable energy development, especially wind and solar energy (3) other energy efficiency gains including improvements in residential and commercial buildings; (4) shifting to low-carbon fuels; (5) geological disposal (sequestration) of carbon dioxide; (6) reducing emissions of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide; and (7) enhanced forest and soil management practices’ (Speth 2009 : 29–30). Many books and articles have suggested multiple solutions to mitigate fossil-fuelled global warming and slow-onset unsustainability: Barnes 2008 ; Jaccard 2005 ; Dauncey 2009 ; Speth 2009 , 2012 ; Jackson 2009 ; Bullard and Wright 2009 ; Giddens 2009 ; Lomborg 2010 ; Pielke 2010 ; Rand 2010 , 2014 ; Nordhaus 2013 ; Moser and Boykoff 2013 ; Hawken 2017 ; Flannery 2015 ; Klein 2017 ; Suzuki and Taylor 2009 ; Suzuki and Hanington 2017 ; Harvey and Orbis 2018 ; Ramish 2018 ; Pink 2018 ; Klenert et al 2018 . Some of these (Harvey and Orbis 2018 ); Rand 2010 , 2014 ) have made excellent contributions in terms of detailed and specific policy guides for designing solutions and moving towards low-carbon energy, typically using already available clean technologies.…”