Town Halls provide a valuable opportunity for government agencies, academic programs, special projects, and other focused interest groups to gather input from the broad Earth and space science community. They are open to all registered meeting participants.

Town halls will be conducted live, will be one hour in length and will be hosted on Zoom Webinar. Live sessions will be recorded and available for on-demand viewing.

In attending #AGU20, be sure not to miss 12 special sessions in addition to the regular programming—covering topics from convergent science to societal challenges to expanding student engagement to bringing in perspectives, communities, and citizens who usually are not able to attend, or usually would not attend, the in-person meeting. These are scheduled during the first and third weeks of the meeting, so as to complement the regular science program. Here’s how they came about:

Back in the alternate world that existed in January, the Fall Meeting Program Committee put out a special request for innovative sessions and meetings-within-a-meeting proposals, building off some of the creative programming that made up AGU’s Centennial and hoping to encourage creative ways to expand virtual or hybrid engagement and programming and connect with other disciplines. More than 60 proposals were submitted!  When the meeting became fully virtual, most of the ones that had virtual engagements of more typical AGU sessions became the model for the meeting. A few that required a hybrid in-person and virtual environment were deferred to 2021 or adopted to the online world. Most of the ones selected provide some creative programming around topics important to AGU’s new strategic plan.  These “meetings-within-a-meeting” span a few hours to a full day and bring a variety of programming and presentation styles to a topic. 

Note: All times listed below are Pacific Time (PT)