By Ian Sommerville, St Andrews University, Scotland
Preamble: I will not be attending the workshop (or ICSE) in person as I have made a personal commitment to reduce my own business travel significantly (alas, the 90% target is not yet realisable). While I understand the rationale for organising this workshop, I think that, as a community, we will not be listened to unless we set an example and that flying many thousands of kilometres to discuss methods of reducing carbon emissions is something that really has to stop.
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April 18, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Justyna Zander
The problem of traveling needs is indeed growing, especially when we approach further career stages. It is not only the sustainability of the natural environment that is at stake, but also the sustainability of life quality, work-life balance, and the ability to decline different business events.
The author tackles an important issue of the mental and technological obstacles.
In terms of technology, please refer to the related work such as telepresence: http://www.cisco.com/web/CA/solutions/tele_index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepresence
Regarding the culture of work, it depends on the work environment and the personalities that we are working with. There are such issues as trust and quality of work already recognized in telework trends that have to be dealt with. Clearly, it is easier to convince the engineers than the humanities-related colleagues to work geographically dispersed.
On the other hand, there is a human need of closeness, togetherness, and real interaction that should not be disregarded. Thus, again, a balance between different trends should be found and adjusted to the individuals.
The author is encouraged to reference case studies related to the three views that he is proposing. What would be the scenarios that telepresence is sufficient, when is it not so successful?
April 19, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Rami Bahsoon
We can continue to preserve the “human experience”, while reducing travel. We teach simple optimisation techniques, data mining, simulation, and predictive statistical models but we don’t employ them in the way we organise and geographically allocate conferences in an attempt to minimise the overall travel! A simple tool running on an energy efficient desktop incorporating a very little of what we teach can still contribute to our climate while preserving the “human experience”[a thought for a simple undergrad senior project
]. Conference organisation bodies should impose new regulations on the organisers, where organisers should justify the location w.r.t. the overall expected mile-savings. Conferences should publish and share their attempts.
Otherwise, the grand challenge may head towards – a Virtual Reality Googlewave-like environment. Participants can register, attend, present, discuss in a virtual yet intelligent and more “human” waves… [Plan B for the grounded EU... ]
April 23, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Sophia Drossopoulou
This is a _great_ paper, and this is an area where CS can make a LOT of contributions, and where still lots need to be discovered.
I have used electronic rather than physical meetings twice recently.
Due to the colvano ashes, we conducted a viva through skype, viso and teamviewer, and chat during the viva to communicate intermediate reactions/thoughts.
For environmental reasons, I held the ECOOP 09 PC meeting as a virtual meeting, supplemented by a longer online review period and four conference calls with all the PC. During the conf calls, i missed indications of the mood, of the PC. The consensus was, that the paper selection was as good as with a physical meeting, but there was less fun, and maybe also fewer opportunities for the PC members to learn from each other.
We do need to do things towards more immersive virtual environments.
April 23, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Jorge Aranda
I sympathize with the author’s concerns, and I think he points to a very significant problem. Even if the global carbon footprint of a bunch of researchers getting together for a workshop was minimal, in the grand scale of things, it’s very likely that “we will not be listened to” unless we set an example.
The problem is that face-to-face interaction with our colleagues seems to be vital for (a) developing a cohesive, productive research community, and (b) for the self-interest of everyone involved. A technological “telepresence” solution might help with (b), but probably not with (a) –Olson & Olson’s “Distance Matters” paper does a good job of explaining why.
However, even if our community needs to fly to get together, the decision of *where* to fly to seems arbitrary to me. Surely we can start by making the very small sacrifice of at least optimizing our gathering place based on our points of origin?
Anyway, an interesting topic for discussion.
April 26, 2010 at 12:31 am
Luis Lamb
I think the paper raises a very relevant issue to the CS community. We are probably one of the “big travelers” of the scientific community, given our conference-driven publication culture. (Of course, we are aware that journals are increasingly important.) However, the author himself suggests that in some fields “presence” is important. This seem to include even the CS community. It seems to me that if one has never attended an (important) CS conference, one is probably not very well connected to the community.
Having said so, we should of course change this trace of our conference culture. New social computing technologies (media and networks) are pushing the “new generation” and ourselves us (a bit) towards a change: the “new generation” is more used to them, and probably see virtual interaction in a natural way.
April 26, 2010 at 2:16 pm
Carla
The paper presents some ideas for reducing business travel. Indeed, there are many challenges to allow a satisfactory remote interaction among people. The paper states three main challenges:
- how to keep formal and informal interactions that happen in conference scenarios?
- how to access information that are on people’s heads?
- how to interact with people remotely and, even so, perceiving the reactions from the audience in order to improve the presentation?
Interesting ideas to deal with these challenges are discussed in the paper. For this reason I recommend discussing this paper at the workshop. I only missed some references related to existing works that could be improved in order to answer the above questions.
April 28, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Ideas for the workshop program « Software Research and Climate Change
[...] Session 1: We’ll open in the first morning session with a keynote from Stephen Emmott of Microsoft Research. Unfortunately, as a knock-on effect of the volcanic dust, Stephen can no longer be there in person, but he’ll be giving his keynote remotely. Ironically, this gives us an opportunity to test out some of Ian’s thoughts about cutting down business travel. [...]
April 28, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Archer Batcheller
A few comments:
I want to object to those suggesting that conference locations be optimized to reduce carbon output for the travel of the set of expected attendees. Or at least consider the side effects of this approach. People plan to attend conferences based on the location – so there is no fixed set of people that one could optimize for. Further, attempts to optimize for the stereotypical set of expected attendees would bias the conference toward locations in the US or Europe. Yes, convenient for us in the global “West” but it makes it more difficult and costly to include those from many developing regions of the world. As long as face time at conferences remains important, this would reinforce existing barriers and inequalities. I’d be curious to see how many more Africans attend ICSE when it is in Cape Town as compared to ICSE in Vancouver.
I also wanted to recommend Hollan and Stronetta’s classic, “Beyond Being There.” This may be a helpful way of thinking innovatively about creating good experiences for non-collocated collaborators without trying to do the impossible of replicating face to face (cf, Distance Matters, as Jorge also pointed out). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/142750.142769
Finally, I wanted to fervently agree with the problem of cultural conventions. Technology changes a lot faster than people and it will take a while to shift choices about travel even after a suitable technology solution is available. (Although this could be sped considerably by an effective carbon tax!)
April 28, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Jorge Aranda
Archer, you raise a good point. I wouldn’t like to shut out developing regions from access to the opportunities that conferences bring. And yet (1) we have most conferences in the US or Europe anyway, and (2) often away from transportation hubs –even, with more regularity than I think the situation warrants, in places like Hawaii or Banff.
I confess, with this issue, as with many others, I’m torn between these kinds of considerations and the seemingly incoming catastrophe. We are told by the people that know what they’re talking about that we’re burning up the world and that we need to bring our emissions down some 90%, fast. This is supposed to be an urgent threat demanding bold, radical actions. And on the other hand, who am I to propose we make it harder for our peers in the Global South to participate in our community by keeping our meetings away from them?
I don’t know if there are some creative solutions to this problem that could still optimize for low emissions. Meeting less, or not at all, is the obvious radical answer, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen given our current culture and face-to-face interaction demands. What, then?
April 29, 2010 at 2:25 am
Archer Batcheller
One approach – albeit a challenging one – is to try to create electronic environments that are BETTER for interactions than conferences (or business sales, or negotiations, etc etc). Sort of in the beyond being there style try to create a space that accomplishes the purposes of conferences better than conferences themselves do. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but we do need to think boldly and ambitiously to solve a problem of this scale.
April 29, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Jorge Aranda
Sure, let’s be bold and ambitious –but let’s also remember that the pressing need is to be quick. We must find a solution (all the way to implementation and general acceptance by the population!) in about a decade.
May 4, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Sam Penrose
WRT meetings per se (especially working meetings) Fred Brooks worked extensively on telecollaboration and found that it worked reasonably well for people who already knew each other, but not at all for people who didn’t. The only link I have is to a long (albeit excellent) video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC-DlX-PaF4 , but I suspect his findings are also in his recent books.
If you believe his results, it suggests a heuristic for eliminating business travel: eliminate trips to meet in person when the participants already know each other.