This week’s chat was hosted by Hazel Ferguson and Katie Wheat, co-founders of #ECRchat. Hazel is a postdoc food researcher in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, and Katie is a postdoc in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University.
After eight weeks of #ECRchat, this week we put the usual format on hold to discuss some possible changes.
Timing, frequency, topics and hosting were the key discussion points.
In October, our clocks will change in different directions. This means that the start time will move to 10am UK (GMT, from last weekend Oct) and 9pm in some parts of Australia (DST, from first weekend Oct). The chatters suggested that this would be fine if the chat was scheduled to occur less frequently. Fortnightly was the most popular choice, so we will be trialling that. A schedule can be found at the bottom of the post on becoming a host.
In addition, ECRchat west has been started by Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega, @raulpacheco, giving those for whom the timing does not work another option [Update: first #ECRchat West coming soon. Follow @ECRchat for news].
We also sought feedback on whether some particularly important topics might have been missed so far, and sought support for continuing the chat by appealing for hosting volunteers. Chatters agreed that family and re-entering academia/non-traditional career paths needed some attention, so we’ll be scheduling those for upcoming chats. We had some generous volunteers, but are always looking for more, please consider becoming an #ECRchat host!
Looking forward to chatting with you all again on the 27th of September.
Hazel.
Here is this week’s tweet archive to download #ECRchat_tweets_2012_09_13
#ECRchat will be back at the same time on September 27 (new fortnightly schedule here). That’s 11:00-12:00 in the UK (BST), 12:00-13:00 in Europe (CEST), and 20:00-21:00 in Australia (EST).
#ECRchat 