Significant travel by researchers to in-person meetings, workshops and conferences has long been seen as a requirement for successful scientific collaboration and communication.

The COVID pandemic demonstrated that other approaches are possible and effective for some aspects of scientific collaboration, but also that these other approaches have limits. The leveling of the playing field during the pandemic allowed many people to participate in ways they would not have had travel been required. It also made clear the obstacles some colleagues have to travel. Child- and elder-care constraints, teaching obligations, disabilities and funding limitations limit travel for many.

Simultaneously, the mitigation of climate change requires reducing the impact and increasing the sustainability of all human activities, including scientific research. Travel is a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions and one for which changes to how research communities work could make an impact.

The objective here is not to understand how all travel can be eliminated. Remote collaboration is hard and “distance does matter”. Informed by these known challenges and the experience from the pandemic, we are studying how scientific communities can replace some travel by effective alternatives and better align role of travel with activities where in-person interactions are most impactful. The goal is to maintain and improve scientific outcomes while simulateneously building a stronger and more inclusive collaboration with reduced ecological footprint.

In the “Future of Meetings” project, we are exploring how such distributed scientific collaborations can evolve and thrive. We are using global particle physics collaborations as a testbed, but expect that some of the results should be applicable more widely. This website includes both information from academic research into remote collaboration and practical information on approaches to evolving the technology, organization of meetings and related processes.