FCRN-L will become TABLE community platform

[Walter Fraanje]

Hi everyone,

Many of you may have noticed that the FCRN has transitioned into TABLE - a global platform for knowledge synthesis, for reflective, critical thinking and for inclusive dialogue on debates about the future of food.

You will have seen that we have a new website; one of the things we have been doing in the background has been to work on building discussion features into it. We are now ready to launch our new discussion platform for the TABLE community, the idea being that this will eventually replace this Google Group. The new platform brings a host of new functionalities such as polls, live-streamed events, etc. but also contains features that we feel you have valued about the Google Group (most notably the possibility to reply by email). The community platform furthermore provides more options to tweak your notification settings according to the topics and threads that you want to follow.

We’ve really appreciated all the discussions and sharing of events, funding calls and other opportunities in this Google Group and we hope for this to continue with an even wider group of participants on the new platform. We invite you all to sign up to the new community platform and start using it. You can sign up to the platform by navigating to community.tabledebates.org and pressing the ‘log in’ button. This will take you to the account registration page on our main website and redirect you back to the community platform after the registration is finished.

The platform currently feels very empty, which is why we need your help. We started a few topics, but the success of the platform will depend on people actually using it - and recommending it to others to use - so that it develops into a dialogue community that people keep returning to. It would be really helpful to us if you would be able to start a thread and/or respond to some of the existing ones to kickstart the community. Please also share the community with colleagues, friends and others who may be interested in discussions about the future of food.

A topic could be about anything:

• A question you came across in your research
• A view or idea or article that you’d like to hear other people’s perspectives on
• An upcoming event or opportunity that you’d like to promote
• Or any other thing that you feel would align to the goals for this community

In addition to this, we’re also very interested in hearing your feedback on the platform itself. Was it easy to navigate? Are there any issues you ran into or suggestions for how we might improve its value to you or other groups of potential users? What platforms or forms of knowledge exchange have worked for you, that we could draw upon? We’ve started a thread where you can share your thoughts, but you can also send them to us by email.

Please let us know if you have any questions or if you come across any issues in using the platform.

Many thanks,

The TABLE team

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Walter Fraanje

Research and Communications officer at Table

Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University and Research

Listen to our new podcast, Feed: https://www.tabledebates.org/podcast