The first regional meeting will take place this Friday, 29 May, starting 2 p.m., at the Royal Society in London. If you’d like to attend, please drop an email to Jason Codrington at public.affairs@royalsociety.org. We look forward to seeing you there. Here is a rough idea of the agenda:
2.00 p.m. Introduction – Peter Cotgreave (Director of Public Affairs at the Royal Society) and Maxine Clarke (Nature) will explain the vision for the Tomorrow’s Giants conference and outline the aims for the meeting.
Participants will divide into groups looking at one of the key themes: data – managing data, future literatures, open science and setting up the infrastructure for sharing; science organization – communication between industry/ services and academia, grant structures, globalization, technological expectations; measuring and assessment – the use of performance indicators, the challenge of having appropriate checks without inhibiting research; people – issues affecting careers in research, scientists’ credit and reward systems, flexibility in changing economic circumstances; and interdisciplinary work – how can interdisciplinary science be judged and which bodies/people are in the best position to do so?
Defining the problem – Through a discussion of one of the five themes each group will identify a number of specific challenges, then choose one to flesh out in more detail.
Possible solutions – Each group will then be allocated one of the problem/challenges raised in the previous session and asked to identify a number of possible solutions, with further details provided on the most significant.
3.30 p.m. Feedback – Volunteers from each group will briefly present their challenges and solutions to the group.
Some of the questions raised may be used to for follow-up online discussion in this Nature Network Forum, and all issues will be fed into the planning for next year’s big conference.

Royal Society 350th anniversary campaign (with more details of the goals).
Royal Society website, where you can find details of how to get there.