Facilities and Environment

Target audience

University administration, especially real estate property and facility premises personnel and technical staff and those whose duty or interest is to develop and maintain university infrastructure (campuses, buildings, technical infrastructure, etc.) or to arrange maintenance, cleaning and other supporting services, or otherwise handle environmental issues. And all other university administrators who are interested in these issues.

Focus areas

The critical topics are currently campus development, learning environment, working environment, and sustainability. Methods of teaching, studying, and working are continuously changing, as is technology. All this affects what is expected of facilities and campuses. Digitalization is changing our ways of doing things and we have to be up to date in this process also.

Activity goals for 2021‒2022

The main activity for the planning group as well as the target audience is the annual Conference.
Because of the Covid-19 Pandemic situation, F&E 2020 Conference was postponed and it seems that
F&E 2021 Conference will be postponed again. The main target at the moment is F&E 2022 Conference in Finland at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu Campus (confirmed with the university).

The group is also working on developing other kinds of activities for the target audience. This new
TEAMS and ZOOM era has opened a lot of possibilities to create other kinds of networking – not only
Conferences.

Planning group normally have two or three face-to-face meetings per year to prepare for coming
conferences and other actual issues, and possibly some smaller workgroup meetings around specific 13 themes (workshop style video meetings). During the most active periods of conference preparation and planning, the group has regular video meetings every two weeks and lot of email messaging, etc.