Words of welcome by the Moderation Team

Howdy fellow Parliamentarians!

Cheers for coming by and reading this message today :)

If this is your first time around -- thanks for joining and welcome to the community of the "European Science Parliament"! We hope you enjoy your inaugural visit to our community; everything should be pretty intuitive and self-explanatory.

We -- the moderators of the platform: Anna Lena, Andreas, Bastian, Bianca, Miguel and Sophie -- are happy to have you onboard and hope you'll enjoy the discussions and networking to come :)

We are here to facilitate the discussions, support you when and where needed and make sure things go smoothly. So whenever you have a problem or would like to make us aware of something, don't hesitate to ping us with a private message.

We want to encourage you to invite colleagues, class-mates, teachers, fellow students, friends -- even neighbours -- of whom you think they might be interested in the science parliament and its current theme "Water". For this purpose, we have implemented a surprisingly easy and sweet "invite" function in the community section of the website which you may have found already.

As you can see, we have already collected more than just a few drops of ideas, opinions, statements and questions around this year's theme "Water." We would like to invite you wholeheartedly to contribute to all these discussions!

None of these debates are, however, about our individual beliefs only -- this is a European Science Parliament, after all. In other words: let's find and share some facts! There are researchers, journalists, policy-makers, social workers, civil society activists, ngo representatives, and many more people out there who have written, spoken, argued, presented, discussed, and debated about water and the issues we have raised.

Let's find some of these statements, opinions, findings, arguments - and let's discuss them and throw in our own opinions and experiences. With all the questions and facts and the resulting discussions we hope and are confident that we will have an exciting time together!

Enjoy yourself, browse around -- make sure your profile has a picture or photo if you haven't done so yet -- and start fact-finding and discussing away :)

You may have noticed already that you can also upload videos, audio files and photos in addition to typing and writing, and we want to warmly encourage you to make use of these possibilities.

The only thing we ask is that when you make factual claims (This is a fact... It is true that... It is well known that...), please do quote a source so other people can follow your statements up. If you can't find a source, simply introduce your statement differently (I think... I have heard... I think I have read somewhere...), and other people may well point to a source - voilà!

Ok, now off you go! See you around -
Sophie, Miguel, Bianca, Bastian, Andreas and Anna Lena