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In July 2024, Birgit, Gunnar, Julia, Kaja and Jonathan went to Dessau-Roßlau for the yearly POLISES retreat. Surrounded by the impressive Bauhaus architecture and the idyllic "Georgium", an 18th century "garden kingdom" that already fascinated Goethe, we enjoyed ideal conditions for an enriching yet refreshing exchange on the work within our group and beyond.

To begin with, we collected feedback from the past year and looked back at a variety of events and achievements: Julia helped to organize the ECEM conference and is close to submitting her first paper, Kaja is currently writing hers and successfully applied for a scholarship, Gunnar significantly progressed with the Harz and NamTip projects and Birgit published a paper on farm typologies and reviewed a dissertation from Oxford. Afterwards, Julia and Jonathan presented the status quo of the hay market project and we discussed suitable visualizations and potential additional scenarios to gain a better understanding of the model. This was followed by Kaja giving an update of the storyline and key findings for her first paper and an outlook on potential follow-up topics. In the afternoon, we discussed the schedule for the upcoming conceptual agri-modelling workshop in September in more detail. Here, we especially focused on the use of engaging creative methods for a breakout session aimed at establishing a common vision on the future of agricultural modelling. The late afternoon and evening we spent with a relaxing walk through the park leading up to picnic with delicious home-made bread by Gunnar, spreads, fruits and a glass of wine.

On the second day, Gunnar presented figures and diagrams for the NamTip overview paper that is currently being finalised, before we continued to prepare for the workshop by classifying our own models in terms of the different dimensions of modularity. This not only helped us to reach sharper definitions of the different relevant aspects and their differences, but also allowed us to gain a better understanding of potential shortcomings in current model design and implementation.
Last but not least, we had short session on mixed topics such as the newly developed OESA coding standards and the creation of a video tutorial for the NomadSed board game. Before heading back to Leipzig, we met former POLISES member Falk Hoffmann, who recently joined the Umweltbundesamt (UBA, Germany's primary environmental protection agency) and was happy to show us around the interesting campus including a new nearly zero energy building, and enjoyed an ice cream to cool off on a hot summer day.

Overall, the retreat offered a great opportunity to get more detailed insights into and more feedback on the individual projects, while also offering some time to work on the collaborative project that is the conceptual agri-modelling workshop. Apart from this productive core, we enjoyed the beautiful and diverse city of Dessau as well as the sunny weather.