London Chemistry Events
Welcome to London Chemistry Events!
We exist to connect the London Chemistry community, and promote sustainable use of resources. At the moment, we do this using our Twitter account, (@LdnChemEvents).
Here you will find a little about the project.
Why?
London has a large, fragmented, Chemistry community. We spend a lot of resources to bring colleagues from all over the world to speak here (spending not just money, but in time, and environmental costs). Sadly, many of us miss events on our own doorstep, never mind in other postcodes. In fact, as a chemist in London, it hasn’t been unusual to travel half-way across the world to hear a talk, only to discover the same speaker was at another institution in London the week before! This is neither constructive nor sustainable. We want to change things, and make sure the community gets more back from the cost of putting on these events.
What?
The problem is that nobody keeps track of what events are happening in this large community, especially the smaller events (university department seminars, society talks, etc). To help make our community more sustainable, we want to put all the London events of interest to working chemists in one place (and even encourage the odd visitor).
People have wanted an authoritative resource listing London’s grassroots chemistry events for a long time, especially smaller talks/seminars/etc in academic departments and societies. Unfortunately nobody has time to do the legwork/upkeep. We don’t either.
Instead, we hope many hands will make light work. At the moment, we use Twitter: we ask people who post/RT London Chemistry Events events to add the #LdnChemEvents hashtag to their posts. We’ll automatically retweet everything with #LdnChemEvents (with small delay as a spam-guard; minimal curation).
We’re getting the ball rolling by RTing/posting some events ourselves, but community participation will determine if this turns out to be a useful resource. We are also looking into a more curated ‘diary’ (if you would like to help, see “Getting Involved”, below).
Get Involved
With relatively few people actively participating, we should hopefully reach a critical mass. We would appreciate it if you could contribute by…
- Using the #LdnChemEvents hashtag yourself (and sticking to London Chemistry Events - we don’t want to spam anyone!).
- Encouraging your colleagues to get involved (to contribute & follow).
- Encouraging anyone with the keys to an institutional account to use the #LdnChemEvents hashtag for events posts.
- Where your institution doesn’t post events/welcome outsiders, encouraging them to do so.
PLEASE don’t be the person tweeting about exciting talks in London AFTER the event!
If you would like to help out with the running of London Chemistry Events, we’d love to hear from you. We would like to grow a small team of volunteers: to help with both events curation (fancy curating an online events diary?), and improving our infrastructure (web/programming people very welcome; or anyone who’d like a project to learn on). We imagine those who would get most out of it are active early-career researchers, but all contributions are welcome. If you’d like to join us, you can find our contact details below.
Content/Curation Guidelines
We want to be a small good thing for the community. That requires a little curation, to avoid an explosion of spam; with participant good will, we hope only a light touch is needed. Below we set out the kinds of events we would like to focus on, what we would prefer not to RT (and may avoid), and some guidelines on how we hope posting will work.
#LdnChemEvents
Initially, we suggested some simple questions to establish whether something should be tagged #LdnChemEvents: “Is it in London?”, “Is it Chemistry?” and, “Is it an Event?”. Our definitions are broad, to keep (@LdnChemEvents) focussed as a small good thing. For example, “Is it Chemistry?” will have is a fairly broad interpretation, perhaps in line with the breadth of the Chemistry Nobel Prize. On the other hand, we try and keep things to London, and actual IRL events (though if anybody wants to set up #CentralBeltChemEvents, #NorthernPowerhouseChemEvents, or #WemChem listings, we’d be excited, and happily help with auto-RT infrastructure).
We’re glad also make an exception to these rules for the annual (early March) RSC Twitter Poster Conference, where we encourage London-based delegates to tag their poster with #LdnChemEvents, so we can RT & highlight the latest exciting local developments.
Kinds of Events
Broadly, our focus will be on grassroots events of interest to working chemists, especially those missed by other listings (e.g. big international conferences), or which are often under-attended. Our bias is to events which are cheap or free to attend; these tend to be run by societies, or universities. We’re happy to make the community aware of relevant paid or commerical events, though.
Where we post events, we’re usually posting publicly available information. We try and get it right (and will do all we can to fix it if/when we don’t), but we’d strongly suggest that you check the source/link/hosts for details & updates before making a trip.
We have received a couple of comments on bias towards particular areas of chemistry, and institutions. We are human (unpaid), and don’t pretent to make comprehensive listings! There is a lot going on, and we may miss you talk, your mates’ talks, and Nobel prizewinners’ talks. If you’d like to cover more of your favourite kinds of #LdnChemEvents, we suggest you get involved: adding the hashtag to appropriate tweets, or posting events. We’ll do the rest…
How we will tag/RT
We will automatically RT tweets with the #LdnChemEvents hashtag. At present, this is automated, and can deal with the volume of traffic we receive. Since many events are initially listed quite some time before they take place, posts may be revived a second time nearer to the event (or important deadlines).
What we will avoid/remove
We want to keep traffic on our feed at a manageable level. We will avoid RTing, or remove, posts which we feel inappropriate (spam). This is likely to include those which are not informing us about #LdnChemEvents, duplicate/repeated posting of the same event, commercial promotions, etc. We hope that our community can make this job easy, by considering the guidelines above.
Contact
If you have any comments, suggestions, or queries (or you’d like to get involved), you can contact us via DMs on Twitter, or at ldnchemevents@gmail.com.