Fostering a Sustainable Community in Batteries

A s with nearly all facets of daily life, the pandemic has upended the traditional routines for science outreach and collaboration for battery researchers of all stripes.In-person conferences, meetings, lab visitations, and sabbaticals have largely been canceled or postponed, disrupting the typical avenues for communication between scientists, engineers, and researchers. Inasingly, researchers have developed creative ways to leverage electronic communication formats, harnessing growing online social media communities to create ad-hoc replacements for the essential functions served by these conventional in-person events.Concurrently, there has been a growing recognition of the fundamental tension between travel-intensive scientific networking and the stated goals of many research fields focused on mitigating anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation.Recent analysis of a European economics conference estimated roughly 0.5 tonnes of CO 2 emissions per participant, while the University of California Santa Barbara recently estimated that conference travel accounts for roughly 30% of its carbon footprint.1,2 Within this context, an online battery modeling community has taken shape.Centered around weekly webinars and a freeflowing Slack workspace, the community fulfills a critical need for connection between battery researchers with diverse backgrounds and interests from all over the world.3 The community provides new avenues for information exchange, networking, and collaboration, which we hope will persist and provide a template for global, decentralized, democratic, and emissions-friendly community-building in a post-COVID science landscape.In this Energy Focus, we describe the formation of this community, clearly state its mission, discuss initial activities, and identify challenges and opportunities moving forward.Origins of the Community.Following a successful inaugural event in 2019, the 2020 Oxford Battery Modeling Symposium (OBMS) 4 was held on March 16 and 17, right at the start of COVID-related shutdowns in Europe and North America.About a week before the meeting on March 10, the organizing committee decided to go virtual.The virtual symposium used conferencing software (Zoom) in webinar mode for all presentations and Q&A.Alongside, a messaging workspace (in Slack) was created for general discussion, which also provided an avenue for in-depth discussions among participants during the talks.Posters were uploaded to a messaging channel, and a subset of poster presenters were invited to present their work in the main presentation webinar.Most of the speakers also posted their slides in the messaging app.At the end of the symposium there was wide consensus that we had phenomenal momentum and the Slack community was gold.The text-driven messaging platform created a richer, more diverse dialogue with a flatter hierarchy than is typically supported at in-person conferences.Without the pressure of trying to fit discussions into crowded conference schedules, participants were able to pose and answer thought-provoking questions, respond with links to relevant citations, and carry the conversation forward over the course of days.However, it was really the combination of webinar and messaging app that stood out as being more than the sum of its parts.Without the messaging app, the presentations would have been far less engaging, but without the presentations at specific dates/times, it would have been difficult to assemble everyone onto the messaging app.Having sufficient critical mass of engagement was pivotal in kick-starting the community.Following this, we started the weekly Battery Modeling Webinar Series (BMWS).Online BMWS sessions have an open format, with frequent pauses for questions (on average session pauses every 20 min), turning a presentation into a moderated organic discussion.At the time of writing, the webinar series had finished the first 11 webinars, with the next dozen already lined up.As described below, the webinar series covers a wide range of topics and has attracted a large, diverse, and highly engaged audience, leading to high impact for the early career researchers who have presented to date.The Role of Social Media.The groundwork for a successful community was laid in part by the burgeoning battery community on Twitter, who typically share and discuss content under the #battchat and #batterytwitter hashtags.Even before the pandemic, there has been a growing recognition that social media and other electronic communication tools such as Twitter and Slack can supplement conference interactions in ways that are more flexible, more democratic, and less transient. [5][6]6][7][8] Social media provides an additional avenue for early career researchers to network and establish identities that are unique from their advisors and