“You are muted”

“You are muted” could well be the phrase we heard most this past year.

COVID-19 subdued not only our movements but even our voices, as we struggled to figure out how to converse on digital meeting platforms. We were forced to alter our work habits, plans, and schedules. Field trips and meetings were postponed once, postponed twice, and eventually cancelled until further notice. Others were held online.

The annual meeting of participants in the Nunataryuk project on Arctic permafrost was one such gathering that went digital. The Nunataryuk General Assembly is usually an opportunity for researchers from across the world to gather in person, but on 15 April this year we all came together on video instead. Even online, it was an important occasion for researchers across partner organizations to meet and discuss permafrost science, update each other on their progress, and plan future research activities. And we found that collaborating online – even muted – actually had some advantages.

This 4th General Assembly was critical to the development of the Arctic Permafrost Atlas, a major deliverable from the project, which GRID-Arendal is taking the lead on. The atlas, a 100-page coffee table publication, will feature state-of-the-art knowledge on permafrost thaw and its impacts on communities in the Arctic.

Levi Westerveld, geographer at GRID-Arendal, explains to meeting participants how to input information into the draft atlas table of contents.

During the meeting, all project partners participated in an online interactive workshop to contribute to the atlas’ table of contents. The table of contents will serve as a skeleton of the atlas, guiding scientific writers and cartographers as they draft text and develop concepts for maps.

In the workshop, project researchers were asked to share three types of information on topics that will be covered by chapters in the atlas – for example, the impact of permafrost thaw on Arctic coastlines.

Key messages. What are the most important messages that the Nunataryuk Atlas of Arctic Permafrost should communicate for each topic?
Published academic work. What are the most important scientific publications that the atlas should draw upon?
Data and maps. What are map layers and data that should be included in the maps and infographics of the atlas?

The online workshop was held in Mural, an online platform that allows users to add post-its, images, and text in a virtual panel. Before the meeting, a framework for the digital panel was designed, to ensure that participants’ contributions were organized and structured logically.

A screenshot video from the workshop shows the many mouses of each participant as they simultaneously contribute information to the interactive panel.

The participants were muted, but they still had a lot to say! In less than 45 minutes, the enthusiastic and knowledgeable Nunataryuk researchers made over 640 individual contributions. These included post-its with text and screenshots of maps and datasets. It proved to be an extremely effective way to collect expert knowledge.

The digital panel also became a meeting space for silent collaborations. Immersing ourselves in this digital space, it was powerful to see so many mouses with names of people we had either met in person or digitally before, actively building and creating something together. Everyone could read each other’s contributions, be inspired, and build on ideas from text and images that had already been added to the board.

A screenshot showing the final 640 images and post-its with text that were added to the interactive panel.

Coordinating such input digitally through tools such as Mural provides a lot of benefits. Getting 70 people into one physical room to work on a whiteboard with real post-its would have been a logistical headache. In comparison, planning and organizing this virtually was a breeze. Because it is digital, people could share hyperlinks directly, and it will be easy to save, organize, and translate all the input into a more detailed table of contents. Two rounds of practice sessions before the day of the meeting ensured that we did not run into issues. (In one practice session, a user accidentally deleted all contributed content!)

COVID-19 has made the last year difficult if not devastating for many of us, leaving even lucky and healthy people craving affection and social interaction. But on the positive side, it has also pushed us to explore and develop new ways of working and interacting virtually. In the case of our digital atlas working session, we enabled participants to actively collaborate on building something together, developing camaraderie and gaining a combined feeling of ownership over atlas. As the world opens up to travel again, there is no doubt that we will take these experiences and new tools with us – perhaps in the form of hybrid meetings, using digital platforms to prepare the ground for a more effective in-depth physical workshop. We look forward to the time we can meet up in person with our Nunataryuk colleagues again, but we now know we can have meaningful exchanges even when we’re spread across the continent.

Written by Levi Westerveld and Tina Schoolmeester.

This is part of the “Nunataryuk Behind the Scenes” series, a collection of stories about the making of the Arctic Permafrost Atlas.

This story was produced as part of the Nunataryuk project, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 773421.