Bests & Worsts
Posted by cdchase on December 15, 2009 | No Comments
Best & Worsts (week one)
Most of these are logistical observations as a first-time attendee to a truly global gathering.
Bests
Tech services – great bandwidth and power availability – bravo to all! We guesstimate that perhaps 2/3 of the delegates had laptops and the Center provided hundreds of free computers. This was the most digitally wired event on the planet ever. We can only hope that the new speed and bandwidth of communications really makes a difference in the outcomes.
Transit access – Many THANKs to the Danish Metro system for providing both free Metro and Bus access to and from the Conference Center at all useful hours and with plenty of helpers around to educate about how to use the system.
Maps at the Conference Center with big YOU ARE HERE dots and helpful attendants available to aid anyone trying to find a specific room in 77,000 square meters (that’s approx 693,000 sq feet) of Conference space. Special mention for having plenty of fine places for sitting and resting, discussing, eating, typing or chilling out.
Daily briefing meetings with the USCAN (Climate Action Network) and the Sierra Club with guest speakers including reps from the U.S. and other delegations. Really the only way to take meaning from chaos and get an insider feed from closed negotiations.
Security and credentialing – firm, yet friendly – chatty even (during off-peak hours) – though things got bad when the BigWigs arrived. As a decidedly non-BigWig – I found arriving at off-peak hours the way-to-go.
Worsts
Recycling – why oh why and when oh when will people learn to recycle? It’s really Not That Hard and yet at a Conference where just about everyone is an environmentalist, this aspect was appalling.
The bins were not in enough locations and I often saw recyclables mixed with waste.
Litterature – a subset of the first item, there was way too much litter on the Conference Center floor of all varieties, but my biggest complaint here is really about the number of trees that died for the amazing amount of literature and books and glossy stuff that will not be read in any detail by 95% of the folks who picked it up. This aspect I find quite dismal.
Acronym City – Would someone Please make a list with definitions of all the UN-related COP acronyms? The official COP15 site had a “dictionary” but the acronyms were not in it!
Who’s who? – related to the problems in Acronym City, I guess you have attend these things for years to know who the real power players are.
Meeting schedules – I couldn’t seem to find a consolidated list of Everything That was Going On. Even when I found the official calendar of events and with screens scrolling events in the Conference Center, I still found interesting things just by looking around. This is a minor worst, but I think they could have set up a system to let folks post events to one central online calendar with a set of sorting categories.
Overflowing meeting rooms – Hard to predict I suppose, but sitting on the floor for major presentations was the order of the day.
Names and Group Names on badges – Not BIG enough. Enough said.
OVERALL – it was a good venue and the Danish people were quite welcoming, even with a sometimes overwhelming police response. It seems that’s necessary for any global gathering in this day and age.
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