A quick fyi, I’ll be presenting about GCRI at the upcoming Climate-Friendly Climate Research conference (11-15 November), hosted by Klimaforschungsnetzwerk Österreich/Climate Change Centre Austria. The conference is of note because it’s being held 100% online. It’s thus “climate friendly” because it avoids the considerable greenhouse gas emissions associated with the travel required for in-person conferences. I think it’s a great idea. For all of GCRI’s online lectures, discussion groups, etc, we’ve never attempted something as ambitious as a whole online conference. I’m excited to attend to see how well it works, and to share insights from GCRI’s experience.

Here’s the info on my talk. I’m also going to try to get a remote collaboration resource online here before the conference. I’ve been sitting on great content for that for a while.

Building an International Think Tank with Remote Collaboration

The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI, gcrinstitute.org) is a think tank founded in 2011 to help mobilize the world’s intellectual and professional resources to meet humanity’s gravest threats, including climate change, other environmental change, nuclear war, pandemics, and more. GCRI has no physical office. Instead, it is designed around remote collaboration so that researchers and others could work together from any location worldwide without travel. In this talk I will discuss the successes and challenges associated with an all-online organization. We have successfully collaborated on papers, hosted an entire seminar series on Skype, and built thriving networks across the world. However, we face limited opportunity for social interaction, limited buy-in from some colleagues, and the occasional technical difficulty. Our experience suggests that an all-online organization can succeed, with structural advantages but also with caveats.