The RAC (Research Activities Committee) organized two side meetings during the IPY Oslo science conference; the Polar Disciplines Meeting, and the Discipline Coordinator meeting. The Polar Disciplines Meeting was open to everyone interested in RAC activities but also in getting to know APECS associated people from their research fields. At the beginning of the meeting, the RAC members introduced the two major established RAC projects to the membership with the help of an online tutorial - the Literature Discussion and the Virtual Poster Session. Afterwards small discipline related groups were formed where we discussed general but also research field related thoughts. About 50 people participated in the meeting and fruitful outcomes nourishing disciplinary but also interdisciplinary development and idea forming within the RAC were achieved.
The RAC Discipline coordinator meeting was towards the end of the week. It was great to meet so many people we worked with before intensively, but now met for the first time. The major focus was discussing the RAC structure and functioning, and how to improve our collaborative work efforts towards getting work done more progressively. Again, discussion about how and why to split up and form categories a certain way, when the major goal is to bring together disciplines and work in a truly interdisciplinary and international fashion. However to achieve this key goals, it is necessary to establish a disciplinary related community, communicate, gather and exchange thoughts and knowledge within disciplines to then bring the Discipline Coordinators together to exchange disciplinary work, thus form the links between disciplines. To do so successfully, results of the meeting included: Category based list servers, like the polar policy list server existing already, will be formed and supervised by the specific discipline coordinator (DC). However, anyone can join any list server, thus one can get interdisciplinary information when interested through joining the list servers interested in. Further, the RAC will limit their calls two every second to third month. All DCs join these calls to exchange experiences, thoughts, ask questions and discuss goals and achievements. The RAC itself will consist of 2 chairs and all DCs at a minimum. All RAC members are also Council members, as the RAC represents the research focussed part of the council. Additionally the RAC will coordinate also all research related working groups, currently including the Virtual Poster Session and the Virtual Poster Session. Additional ideas for further working groups are under development. The Working Groups are open to ALL APECS members, and we still need help also in the research related working groups. If you are interested to work with the RAC in any of these groups, please contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Overall, the RAC meetings brought together the research focussed APECS community, and established a better basis for successful progressive collaborations and work over the next years to come.
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