Community seminar 01-04-2026 - Show and tell and future directions

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No formal seminar this week but instead a show and tell plus open discussion on future community directions (3pm UK time today!)

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We had a good discussion. There were some high-level thoughts:

  • Themed meetings with user-submitted themes and then the organisers find someone to lead the discussion
  • A journal club
  • I would like to run a talk submission form
  • I would like someone else to give a talk submission form
  • Setting up a mailing list or at least giving guidance on how to use the forum to do so
  • Making the private list of planned speakers public in some way. Using this to communicate with more lead time who is speaking.
  • Trying to better connect the seminar and forum populations
  • Reorganising the forum categories
  • Rewording the forum and epinowcast.org information to better capture the aims of the community i.e real time modelling of infectious disases and connected topics.
  • Potential for an org level name change. There was a suggestion this might make people feel more welcome as they don’t currently feel comfortable as they don’t contribute to the software

The high level was the best bits of the meetings are the open discussion and the behind the scenes elements of the talks. Not so much when we get a very focussed here is my paper style talk.

I took from that we should work on how we communicate that more clearly and structures we can set up to promote it.

To do all of these suggestions I think we might need to move to more than one meeting a month but I would think we should go slowly slowly with that to make sure we can handle it capacity wise.

Personally, I think there are quite a few downsides to an org level name change as it has some recognition and is at least somewhat descriptive. We could maybe change a tag line as a half way house? That being said I am open to doing so if others strongly feel it is a good way to go and have some good suggestions (with cheap to buy domain names).

Please post any thoughts here!

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Thanks Sam! Sorry I couldn’t make it.

I don’t feel strongly about any of the naming - but that may be because I’m an active user. A tagline / clearer description sounds sensible.

A better lead time on presentations / plans would be very helpful, I often book over the slot as I am not sure if there’s going to be a talk.

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