The C2HEKE, short for Climate Change and Hazards Education Knowledge Environment, is an online venue that goes beyond a normal webpage. It provides up-to-date information on the PASI, with specific details on current and upcoming activities, lecture topics, institute agenda, and links to related initiatives. But it also serves as the virtual environment for capturing and producing the knowledge presented and generated during this innovative collaboration.
During the actual two-week long training event in Panama, participants will be authorized with collaborative authoring permissions to use this website as a source for notes, presentations, and instructional materials, as well as links to external data and methods of analysis. The site uses web-based collaborative social technologies to create an online virtual learning and research facilitation environment that serves multiple functions and is developed via open co-authoring software tools. Functions include a semi-private Wiki system that allows mass co-authoring of the site and content contribution, storage, and exchange functionalities. The final objective is to create a knowledge-environment that can be transformed into a long-term sustained vehicle for the preservation and dissemination of the institute’s outcomes. It also features an integrated community discussion forum where topics are seeded and structured to capitalize on the group members' respective talents. In addition to research community resources, the C2HEKE site will provide mentoring information and an opportunity for graduate students and early career researchers in the field to connect with each other and with expert mentors beyond the group of lecturers.
The C2HEKE adds to the impact of the institute itself, structuring time and activities to its development in an integrated schedule with the PASI event and beyond. For example, participants will be tasked with posting research questions, contributing to a common bibliography, and engaging with pre-event discussions to be used as a self-organizing framework for identification of workgroups that will emerge from the institute. As such we envision that it will play a significant role in preparing and optimizing participation. With reading assignments posted prior to the event, and lecture notes available before each presentation participants will have a much richer and productive experience during the two weeks on-site. In our experience, participants who are structurally engaged in such work ahead of workshops have a significant head start in forming working relationships and remain engaged well after the event concludes. During the actual institute, the C2HEKE will record summaries of discussions on individual lecture or discussion session pages (see an example), will capture ideas and directions during wrap-up and integration session pages, and will maintain an archive of research questions that the group does not have time to sufficiently address during the sessions. It will help to establish and refine a common terminology, important for interdisciplinary work, and to support multilingual treatments of topics (e.g., autotranslators). After the event, the site will spotlight publications, seminars, and collaborative research arising from the PASI by managing the production and dissemination of the White Papers and Research Agenda.