Over 70 scientists, resource managers, students, and other international stakeholders attended the OOIFB Town Hall event at the 2026 Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) in Glasgow, Scotland.
What Questions Can We Answer Through Cross-Networking? An Ocean Observatories Initiative Facility Board (OOIFB) Town Hall to Strengthen Connections and Foster Innovation Across the Observing Community
When: Tuesday, February 24, 2026, 12:45-1:45pm GMT
Where: Scottish Event Campus (SEC), Room Carron
This Town Hall served as a catalyst to build connections within the observing community, communicate successes, and discuss ways to address the common challenges that different groups may be facing. Through a panel-facilitated discussion, innovative approaches already emerging across observatory systems were highlighted and invited panelists shared examples and insight from their own domains. Town Hall participants were also invited to surface actionable ideas, celebrate successful models, and strengthen the connections needed to accelerate progress across global observing networks.
The discussion was moderated by Dax Soule (Queens College, OOIFB Chair), and included the following panelists:
- Jim Edson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI)
- Meghan Paulson, Ocean Networks Canada (ONC)
- Lucie Cocqempot, French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER)
- Sebastiaan Swart, University of Gothenburg
- Yavor Kostov, British Antarctic Survey
A Town Hall agenda outline can be found here.
A Town Hall Q&A Summary will be available soon.
The panel addressed a suite of questions that aligned well with high-priority topics identified in the RSVP responses received online ahead of the event. Audience-generated questions included those on research-ready data products (especially from an early-career scientist perspective), working with local communities, and translating the science/data back to those communities, and then how to better leverage groups that are working on standardizing observations, QA/QC, data formats, etc.
