The new reality for MW Gaia Virtual Meetings

With the start of the COVID19 pandemics the world changed, and with it we had to change how we interact with our colleagues worldwide. Virtual meetings are nowadays one of the preferred options, and they might stay even when the pandemic is over. However, we are all very new at this, and need to keep working on improving how these meetings are settled. To do so, feedback from participants is key to improve the organisation of future meetings.

Maria Monguió, Postdoctoral Researcher at Universitat de Barcelona, has prepared a specific survey template for our COST Action meetings to learn how their experiences could be improved and apply the outcome to future meetings.

Because your opinion matters!

The questionnaire is set up in a google form, and it does not take more than 5 minutes to fill it. It includes questions about the general organisation and the quality of the meeting itself, the preferences between virtual vs in person vs hybrid, whether there has been any kind of social interaction during the meeting, the place where participants are holding the meeting (home vs office), availability during all the schedule of the meeting, and length and distribution of the sessions. Personal -non-identifying- information regarding age, gender, family status, country, etc is also included in order to correlate the results with these factors.

First evaluation & feedback

In general terms, first results indicate hat participants are very happy with the quality of the meetings and thankful to the organisers for the work done. Virtual meetings allow for a very large participation from people from many different places, with an important fraction being from non-COST countries. However, time zones become a difficulty, as well as having to attend other duties.

Virtual meetings reach farther than the direct COST Action participants, enlarging the impact of the Action. Another advantage is that virtual meetings also allow users to follow only a few talks, instead of the whole meeting. In counterpart, virtual meetings do not allow face to face social interactions, something very missed for participants, leading to the introduction of tools like slack channels.

The preferred format for future meetings is hybrid. No cases of harassment and/or missconduct have been reported in any of the meetings. In general, Women feel clearly less comfortable asking questions and people with no kids tend to attend a larger fraction of the sessions.

Interested in using the survey?

If you are keen to use this survey for your meeting, please contact lbalaguer@fqa.ub.edu. She will give you access to a Google Drive where the survey is, as well as some instructions on how to handle the questionnaire and tools to analise it.