I hope you are all healthy and safe, and making the best of the current situation.
You are now aware that the IUCr meeting in Prague has been postponed to a more appropriate date, hopefully, August 2021. Many other conferences for this spring, summer, and possibly autumn, have also been cancelled or rescheduled.
As chairman (and with the support) of the IUCr Quantum Crystallography commission, I believe that this unprecedented situation calls for action.
Allow me first to put forward a short-term proposition, drawn from the two beliefs outlined below.
Firstly, science should not be put on hold, and an essential part of its progress is fueled by exchanging ideas with peers. Such means is even more crucial for young researchers or graduate students. More often than not, they can only rely on a modest scientific network and have little opportunity to discuss their results with anyone else outside their immediate circle, sometimes even limited to their PhD adviser. To be even more specific, I believe the cancellation of this year's scientific meetings may be a significant handicap for students in the second half of their PhD work. I am therefore convinced that every scheduled event cannot be postponed by 365 days without causing significant harm. Something must be organised this summer so that (especially young) researchers can present and informally discuss their results with a large portion of the QCr community.
Secondly, the scientific community cannot exonerate itself from the worldwide effort to decrease global warming. I am not familiar with the detailed contribution to the total carbon footprint of the scientific community's air travel (although studies exist such as this one or that one). However, if the value is marginal on the absolute scale, it is also a matter of world-citizenship to show that everyone is doing their bit in the global effort.
Additionally, we are all experiencing increasing difficulty finding a decent travel budget each year so that members (especially the least experienced ones, and those who have officially retired) of our groups get a chance to attend the meetings, which are most relevant to their research subjects. This difficulty is not about to vanish. Moreover, I am not over-optimistic about a situation where money rains down on us in the next coming years.
Therefore, I think it is the right time to experiment with new ways to meet at a distance, to get together from afar, exchange in an informal manner through guided electrons instead of pure photons.
I believe, since the time slot for the IUCr meeting has already been defined and probably written down in everyone's diary, we could maintain a two-day (or three-day) light meeting at the end of August. We could have some kind of poster sessions where firstly each poster would be given a rapid live presentation time (say 3 min) in a plenary session. We could even have a book of abstracts for posters. Then the poster presenters would wait in a virtual room to present her/his work and exchange ideas with the participants. The participants would go from room to room to discuss with the presenters. Furthermore, we could have short talks (say 15 min) live, to keep it less formal. Additionally, I would like to set up a discussion meeting on a particular topic relevant to the future of QCr.
Posters and oral presentations could be collected in a book of abstracts hosted by our IUCr page to give it some sort of perennial trace and serve as a reference for the young colleagues who want to put this web-meeting in their CVs. No specific possibility has yet been explored but it is worth considering publishing conference proceedings in a special issue of a journal to be defined.
We could even organise a stay-home-banquet event with one (or several) colleague playing live music. We already have a sponsor for three poster presentation prizes (book vouchers for World Scientific catalogue).
This would be a first attempt to overcome the current situation but could pave the way to transform a fraction of our traditional meetings to a less expensive, more sustainable format.
Since this is my last run as QCr commission chairman, I would feel terrible not having done my best to help attenuate the effect of the IUCr meeting adjournment.
In order to start organizing the event, I have hired a small team of students from my institution who are willing to build the online structure (nothing fancy but smooth and friendly) and then help the attendees during the conference.
Before we proceed any further we need to know how many participants/attendees are likely to show up. Therefore I kindly ask you to answer as soon as possible the following survey which is simply to help us with the scaling of the structure and decide whether or not it is worth the pain and money from our side. Feel free to transfer this email to any colleague with interest in QCr.
Speaking of money, I will do my best to keep the meeting as inexpensive as possible (the target is to keep it free of charge).
