ESA2012 - Through the magic of Twitter-vision

A special double post to celebrate the start of #30DayGreen. Were back at ESA2012, but in a very different way.

Madhu does such an amazing job of attending conferences via the Internet that I originally asked him if he wanted to write about his experiences at ESA2012. When it turned out thatnot only was he not there, but he was in a completely different continent, we decided that it'd be a great opportunity for him to reflect on how modern technology allows us to attend conferences all over the world without breaking our daily routines. Here Madhu reflects on the advantages and drawbacks of virtual conferencing.

Name: Madhusudan Katti

Date: 5th to 10th August 2012

Location: Portland, Oregon, US (Stockholm, Sweden)

Website: http://www.esa.org/portland/index.php

"Mind in Portland, body in Stockholm...?", asked a colleague when I turned up for a meeting last week, and said, "Well, here we are... where is everybody else?". As it happened, I had turned up a full 24 hours early for this meeting. Fortunately, though, this was a teleconference so I hadn't had to actually physically turn up anywhere - but merely log into Skype. And he was right about my mind being in another timezone...

That was how the past week went by, my mind occupying some virtual space over Portland, Oregon, USA, far away from my body in Stockholm, Sweden. An odd sort of jetlag, involving no physical, but considerable mental travel, all courtesy of the Twitter teleporter. Let's call it twitlag. I spent most of the week hanging around in the twitter backchannels of the Ecological Society of America's 97th annual meeting. What's more, my wife was there with our daughters, after presenting a poster at the 2012 Public Participation in Scientific Research Conference preceding the ESA meeting, so I was keeping up with both my personal and professional families virtually! The nine hour time difference turned my diurnal clock quite upside down, as my evenings and nights were submerged in an alphabet soup of hashtags, first for #PPSR2012, then #ESA2012 and finally #ESAsocial, in addition to my own #BiodiverCity for a symposium that I co-organised for ESA2012. Thus my oddly intense involvement in what even several years ago might have seemed altogether strange (maybe it still does): attending a scientific conference happening half a world away without physically traveling there! And not through video webcasts or webinars or anything bandwidth intensive, but through what are essentially text messages, with an occasional link.

The ESA's membership has been relatively slow in getting on the twitter bandwagon. I was probably among the first to try and live-tweet from an ESA meeting three years ago, in Albuquerque, but such solo tweets drift away into the electronic wilderness without a hashtag for a community to crystallize around. ESA's twitter conversation began to hit critical mass with #ESA2011, and really took off this year, reaching a point where it was now possible for people in remote places to engage with conversations happening at the meeting in meaningful ways. A big helping hand came from ESA's promotion of the official hashtag, and more importantly, their generosity in finally providing free WiFi access throughout the conference. I suspect though that the majority of the meeting's record 5000 attendees would be bewildered about "hashtags".

So what does it mean, exactly, to engage meaningfully in a conference halfway around the world, only via twitter?

Getting Involved & Being Yourself

For one thing, twitter lets you be as shyly passive or gregariously active a participant as you might be in person at the conference - maybe even more so - but without fewer constraints of the conference schedule. Skim through the tweets as they come (while you try to stay awake or fall asleep), browse through them later over your coffee at the breakfast table, or on the subway during your commute, or engage in the full cycle of read-retweet-reply to tweets in a sustained fashion: it is entirely up to you. For a science conference junkie like me, it is easy to drown oneself in the torrent of tweets. If you know when a particular talk or session is happening, you can check the hashtag then try and eavesdrop on the chatter from the room. If you're lucky, you might get a flood of tweets from the session, or you could be searching for one amid a deluge from other sessions. On the whole, you have little control over which talks or sessions you might attend, unless you have a few friends who share your interests that you can rely on to live-tweet the talks you want to hear.

Everywhere & Nowhere

Following along with twitter has the fantastic advantage of allowing you to be pretty much everywhere at once, at every session and in every discussion. However, you often get a somewhat warped view of the conference, as the individual interests and perspectives of the live-tweeters filter and refract the science being presented, and colour the ensuing discussions. Case in point, my #BiodiverCity symposium coincided with a far more popular session on taking ecology into the 21st century! So I spent half the night glued to my laptop trying to glean something about how my co-authors were presenting our collaborative research amid a torrent of tweets from the 21st century session. I did learn a lot of interesting things from that parallel session, which I would have missed had I been in Portland because I would have been at my symposium. But my twitter friends didn't do much to allay my anxiety and curiosity about my session, with but a handful of tweets about just a couple of talks in it. That illustrates the biggest drawback of twitter conferencing, it's a lot like a technological game of Chinese whispers. The quality of what you learn depends entirely on the whims of the twittering hordes and their ability to rapidly relay, via some handheld/laptop device, what is being said up on the podium. Very few speakers at #ESA2012 had made their slides available online in advance, and only one or two had set up tweets summarizing their main points to go out during their talks. The ability to live-tweet the bullet points on one's slides... how long before that becomes a standard feature of presentation software?

Condense & Consolidate

Twitter does provide a thorough overview of a conference, weighted - assuming enough people are tweeting - according to the things people are most interested in or excited about. Here's what twitter told me this year's ESA meeting was mostly about:

• Stewardship, sustainability, ecosystem services, and a drive to use these concepts to address our environmental problems.
• Social sciences got much more than the lip service they usually get from many ecologists.
• Actual social scientists, remain an uncommon species at ESA, despite this year's record attendance.
• Ecologists are more ready than ever to put their science on the line, and take action to help shape public policy. What's more, they're actually putting in the effort to learn how to do this effectively.
• There was a lot of talk about communication, with ecologists exhorting each other in session after session to learn how to talk not just to other scientists, but to the broader public and especially to policy makers, if we care about making a difference in the world with our science.
• Many ecologists still haven't figured out how to present their research in compelling ways, to tell their stories with the passion that drives them to do the research in the first place.
• Some ecologists are becoming great storytellers, especially when they collaborate with artists in finding creative ways to share science.
• ESA continues to play to its internal choir, with nary a talk or session welcoming the public in to engage with all the ecologists keen to save their environment.
• ESA meetings remains as colourful as ever, featuring a parade of Hawaiian shirts and sandals
  

One evening during the ESA, while out exploring Stockholm, I wound up at the statue of the great Carl Linné who founded modern taxonomy, in the middle of a park in the city. As I sat there at his feet looking up at the great man's likeness, contemplating his legacy, and waiting for the live-tweets to resume from Portland as ESA's morning sessions got under way, I couldn't help but tweet this:

"What's that sound, like a distant flock of birds twittering?", asks Linné. "Your intellectual descendants @ #ESA2012" pic.twitter.com/RlbiY2Cs

(Images from the conference website, JoshSeman via Flickr and the author via twitter, respectively)