Notes on Virtualising A Traditional Conference
EvoStar 2020 14-17 April notes on a virtualised conference
For circulation.
The first thing to say is it worked. Papers were presented to an
audience scattered across the globe. The rest are rather detailed
comments aimed at other conferences who might be forced onto the
Internet.
Zoom.us
Zoom audio varied between poor and awful. Sound and visual never
synchronised. Zoom shared screen almost always very good. However even
in full screen mode bottom 15% of display may be lost due to being
covered by zoom controls or PC controls and icons
(Click here
for example of problems seen at remote end).
Suggest presenters
use the whole of their screen for their slides and even then avoid
using lowest part of their slides for critical information. Similarly,
if using combined screen and camera, avoid placing critical
information in top right corner of their slides (eg important part of
overly long titles).
Chairing
EvoStar chairing good. Idea of chair reading out questions submitted by zoom
chat chanel seems to work best. Better than inviting questioner to
speak. Often there were two chairs, who seem in many cases to split
dealing with the speaker and audience and dealing with technical
issues (start/stop zoom, admitting laptops to zoom meeting, start/stop
videos). Although there were cases, eg Mike ONeill, where audiance
question worked well.
Start of sessions
The chairs need to keep remote audience
informed, especially if nothing is happening, e.g. "due to technical
difficulties we will start 5 minutes late".
Backup Videos
Pre-recorded video seems essential. Given recording is required, what
does live presentation add? Is it just emotional? If presentation is
not live, would we the audience actually make time to attend the
session and watch the video.
Electronic Proceedings
The EvoStar proceedings were available during the conference. This
should have been made more obvious.
YouTube
Youtube live streaming was used for the two keynotes. Some speakers
put their pre-recorded videos on YouTube.
Both keynotes were about an hour long and intended to be publically
available. It appears YouTube promoted them to the Internet as a
whole. There was a technical problem with the second, which appears
not to have been YouTube's fault but related to a problem in the
Keynote speaker's kitchen.
Chat channels
Both Zoom and Yuotube offer text only many-to-many chat between
audience, chairs and speakers. Mostly chat is simply noise but perhaps
that would be expected of a social interaction in a conference. Good
use of it for posing questions (see above).
On YouTube the second
keynote attracted the idiot end of the internet who was not interested
in the conference and used the chat chanel to insult it.
Best papers
Best paper vote, check with EvoStar organisers how well zoom.us vote
actually worked
Posters
A different system (https://meet.jit.si open source) was used for 3 poster sessions.
Timetable
The time table was based on the traditional conference schedule.
Including gaps for "coffee breaks" and "lunch". The major changes were
adding extra "poster" sessions and cancelling the final washup/next
year/AGM session. The cancellation should have been better
communicated to the "attendees". The time table used local time but
should have made this explicit well before the conference. Almost all
attendees and presenters used the local timezone, or something near by
(-1 hour). There were a few attendees and presenters
(from USA and New Zealand)
based in radically different time zones.
The detailed timetable was generated and hosted by EasyChair.
As the time table is not
printed layout is haphazard, the usual page headings are not present
or not visible on a near infinite variety of different screen sizes.
Therefor each session headings should include not just time but also
day of the week as well as the usual room "location".
Email and Web WWW Pages
Good use of email. Email used extensively to organise and communicate
with registered conference attendees. Perhaps also daily information
(such as zoom meeting ids, URLs) could be available on a central easy
to find web page?
In which case, might also need to consider distribution of passwords.
GECCO, EuroGP, and others show a trend where conference web pages are
increasingly ornate, have little information and are out of date.
EvoStar 2020 pages mostly date from time when the conference was
seeking submissions. Not useful during or after the conference.
No shows
I did not see a single case of a total no show. One case where a video
was shown by session chairs but none of the authors was "present" to
defend their work, there was no discussion and no questions.
Mixing accounts
For practical reasons a few zoom accounts were used by different
people. Some confusion about who was who. In a familiar conference,
this was readily resolved, as the chairs knew most people present.
Might be harder in bigger more diverse event. Need post conference
team (see below) to fixup attribution when stuff is archived on line?
Practise before hand is essential
After the conference
Perhaps there needs to be in a place a post-conference team (not busy
during the conference) to maintain momentum. E.g. publicise the next
year. To update web pages. To make sure videos that were promised to
be put online are on line. To test proceedings are available.
Other notes
First distributed by email
Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 10:23 AM
A few additional notes Apr 23.
Pointer to other notes added 11 May 2020.
(Last updated 11 May 2020.)