Mar 25 2026 (15:00 – 16:30)
Location: Sânwalden, Fryske Akademy
By: Wouter Vansteelant, Esther Drijver & Bastiaan Blaauw

Recent political developments have heightened the urgency for European organizations to reassess their reliance on currently mainstream cloud providers and digital services. In a recent publication in UKrant the RUG announced it has the ambition to decouple from big tech by 2030 and already offers some concrete suggestions for alternative tools accessible to RUG staff. The EU also set up a handy repository of European alternatives for digital products. During this woemibo we will ask you to share your thoughts about the RUG’s proposal to become “sovereign” by 2030, and about whether BirdEyes can or should do more at the team level to accelerate this development.

It is also high time to organize a team-level conversation about the responsible and effective use of Artificial Intelligence at BirdEyes. AI tools offer unprecedented opportunities to accelerate our research and expand the scope of our analyses. But transformative technology also introduces significant challenges and risks. Many of you will by now have read about the general concerns about scientific integrity and AI’s environmental impact, or about its possible impact on ecology in particular (fyi: Wouter was recently asked to consider how AI could be a curse for ecology for the “Splijtzwam” section in De Levende Natuur). More importantly though,  we have noticed a widespreak uptake in the use of AI at BirdEyes too, for tasks ranging from note-taking, to searching coding solutions, to creative processes like illustration and writing. 

With a large number of newly incoming PhDs, we want to identify the top 3 tasks or processes where AI is already having a large impact on everyday working practices, both in a positive and concernings sense, and explore what steps we can take at a team-level to offer guard rails towards a safe and effective use of AI.