3rd annual MID4S team kick-off

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Our sustainability team (MID for Sustainability - MID4S) at my department held our third kick-off this past week (1st kick-off, 2nd kick-off). I'm the team leader and this time around we were in my home near Liljeholmen.

Nine persons turned up, but most couldn't stay exactly the whole day. It was still really nice to talk about out activities - both past and future - with Elina, Åka, Malin Ulrica, Hanna, Jonas, Cecilia and Ambjörn. We had a tough and ambitious program and ended the day with eating out. I won't go through the whole program but I will point out some of the highlights.

We have decided that there are a few conferences the team focuses on, mainly ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) and the CHI (and related) conference. CHI has a subgroups that focuses on "Sustainable HCI" and people write sustainability-themed papers also for a few "related" conferences (e.g. NordiCHI, DIS, Ubicomp etc.). At the kick-off, we also discussed what other conferences team members aimed for in 2015 and the suggestions spanned design (Nordes, EAD), tangible computing (TEI, UIST), sustainability, energy and behaviour (ECEEE, Behave, BECC), Critical computing and others. We also discussed journals that were of interest to the team and to individual team members as well as calls for research funds.

We then has a very good discussions about the team vision. We formulated a vision at last year's kick-off with the aim set at 2018. We went through it to see if we were making progress in realising the goals we formulated last year and we really did feel we had made progress on almost accounts. We then progressed and had a look at the goals we had formulated for 2014 - have we live up to them and do they (still) make sense? Based on that work we formulate new goals for 2015, for example:
- Make a difference (have an impact) on the internal sustainability work at the School for Computer Science and Communication.
- Formulate at least five bachelors' and three masters' thesis proposal (the latter together with companies in the area).
- Write at least 12 sustainability-related "texts" (interpreted liberally) and preferably in new constellations of team members.
- Have our research be referred to in at least 5 popular texts (written by us or by journalists)
- Establish an internal review procedure for articles and research grant applications.

At this point, relatively late in the afternoon, we were starting to run out of energy and we switched to something more concrete - thinking up concrete ideas for ICT4S 2015 research papers (call for papers). The deadline for the conference is March 15 and it would be good to have many basic ideas formulated already before the end of this year. When work starts up again after new year, there is only about two months left to write up our articles and that is not too much if we also plan to have an internal review process up and running.

The account above sounds very instrumental but there was also time for social activities, including coffee breaks, lunch and walk in the early December gloom to get a pinch of air. This was the third kick-off in a row and it was (once again) very successful. Elina also wrote up an account of the kick-off and published it on the MID4S blog. I think we have a great team and I'm sure we'll do better and reach higher each year!
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