The WWW-YES Brazil 2009 provisional program

The WWW-YES-Brazil-2009 workshop will take place from Monday 26 October 2009 to Friday 30 October 2009 from 9:00 to 17:30 at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais (Brazil) (see first announcement).

1/ Official opening of the workshop (26 October 2009)

Within a morning session open to institutions and UFMG PhD students, the 9th edition of the WWW-YES workshop will be officially opened and 3 example of programs related to urban water will be presented:

– The European research project SWITCH "Managing Water for the City of the Future" to which UFMG is participating,
– The European research project DayWater "An Adaptive Decision Support System (ADSS)
for the Integration of Stormwater Source Control
into Sustainable Urban Water Management Strategies" which is coordinated by Daniel Thevenot at LEESU,
– The Festival de l’Oh, a unique water festival annually organised by the Val-de-Marne county.

2/ Oral presentations (26 to 29 October 2009 - half-day sessions)

Each participant has to prepare a 10 min scientific presentation, in English, on his / her research project and be ready for 30 min detailed scientific discussion during the workshop, also exclusively in English, chaired by the workshop participant in charge of reviewing his/her manuscript.

The oral presentation (ca. 10 slides) should especially focus on:

– The scientific context of the research subject,
– The research questions that are expected to be answered during the PhD preparation, together with their environmental justification,
– The field and/or lab and/or model methodologies that are currently or will be used, together with their justification for addressing the questions presented before,
– One or two major results obtained so far,
– The planned research activity till the end of the PhD (or after its termination, in the case of a PhD which is already finished).

Workshop participants are reminded of the large diversity of background knowledge within their colleagues, i.e. from natural to human sciences: thus these oral presentations should be extremely clear and well illustrated, allowing non-specialists of the research field to understand the raised environmental questions and the applied methods.

Each participant will received a manuscript to review, using a referee report form: this review is expected to be filled and sent back prior to 2 October 2009 to Daniel Thevenot, who will then send these reports to the author of the refereed manuscript. Thus WWW-YES-2009-Brazil participants should be ready, after their oral presentation, to answer to comments and questions raised by his/her referee.

Since 2008, all participants are offered to publish their paper in an Open Source specific collection. A selection of papers may also be proposed for publication as a WWW-YES proceedings book.

A printed version of the proceedings draft version will be given to each participant upon arrival. In the meanwhile a light version of this document will be available: due to file size limitations on this server, all photographs and numerous illustrations may have to be deleted.

3/ Field visit (28 October 2009 afternoon)

A half-day technical visit will be organised on 2 sites of Belo Horizonte. One of the environmental goals of the city is to progressively renovate its slum districts. A visit of the city waste water treatment plant is also expected. This visit is accompanied by a senior scientist to ensure the transfer of knowledge.

4/ Public discussion on drinking water management (28 October 2009 evening)

In the evening of Wednesday 28 October, all WWW-YES-2009-Brazil participants are invited to take part to a public discussion session with institutions, associations and citizens of the city of Belo Horizonte on the topic of "Drinking water management: results of an international survey conducted by young environmental scientists". Translation to/from English should be offered to the workshop participants, so that they understand the questions raised by the public in Portuguese and are able to reply in English.

Thus each selected participant will receive in July 2009, an html link to an on-line survey questionnaire which should be filled prior to 2 October 2009 on a city of his/her choice (except for Belo Horizonte where the workshop takes place) . 2-3 voluntary workshop participants will prepare an English summary of the surveyed towns and present it orally to the public together with the necessary illustrations. Workshop participants may be asked specific questions on the town which they have studied for this survey.

5/ Collaborative projects (27-30 October 2009 - half-day sessions)

At the start of the workshop, participants will be invited to build multidisciplinary groups of 4-5 persons. Each group will prepare a proposal for international scientific research, under the guidance of senior experts. The topics of these proposals are defined with the help of actors of decentralized cooperation in the field of water supply and sanitation, or with academic searchers.

For better understanding of such role game, this collective proposal preparation will be introduced by a short course about scientific proposal writing and accompanied by senior scientists who have all experienced European research projects.

Each research proposal results both into a one-page ‘expression of interest’ distributed to participants and into an oral presentation and discussion with a panel of senior scientists and practitioners on the afternoon of Friday 30 October 2009. The aims are to learn how to justify all aspects of an international research project and to help participants to possibly obtain a support for future environmental research projects.