Scientific conferences:
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Scientific conferences:
- what makes them so much better in person than online?
- How can we improve online conferences so people enjoy them as much as in person ones?
- What's your favourite platform for online conferences? #Gathertown isn't bad I think? And obviously #Neuromatch did great (are these still going?)
Serious questions please boost and give us your thoughts
#Conferences #Neuroscience (or not) #OnLine
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I’d love to see online conferences happen over a week with an interface like Instagram so you can present a poster or short video and people can comment asynchronously from any time zone. Online needs to embrace the benefits of multiple locations rather than trying to replicate in-person events.
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@elduvelle at their best, I found online conferences during COVID better than in person ones before and since, because there was so much more engagement with people chatting excitedly in the comments section, questions from not the usual suspects, etc. That has largely stopped now because people got oversaturated and less engaged. I think if you want to do an online conference right now you can't try to approximate an in person conference you have to do something new, or at least a bit adapted to the format.
For SNUFA (http://snufa.net/) we have just two short daily sessions only on a focused topic, and it works really well. It's also easy and cheap enough to run that two of us can do it easily (total budget this year is about $60 and I'll probably spend about 12h total on the organisation). I think it's a good model because even though it's so little work we get around 700 participants each year and it's a small community so you're reaching a significant part of it by participating.
I suspect there's a lot of mileage in doing innovative stuff that looks even less like a conference and more focused on meeting people.
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@neuralreckoning @elduvelle GECCO was hybrid this year. I was going to go in person, but plans got messed up. Turns out, attending virtually was kind of a joke, at least for me. With the time zone difference, I couldn't attend most of it. Nobody showed up to my virtual session, and why would they? All the action was in person, and why would you step away from that to hop on a zoom call?
My takeaway is similar to what Dan said: if you want a good virtual conference experience, you have to design something for that experience and not just follow traditional models.
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@ngaylinn @neuralreckoning I agree. The virtual aspect in a hybrid conf almost always sucks. It has to be full online or not at all..
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@elduvelle @ngaylinn in principle hybrid can work but not if it's after thought like this.
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@neuralreckoning @elduvelle Making hybrid work sounds really hard! Have you seen any examples of that done well?
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@ngaylinn @neuralreckoning @elduvelle since 2020 we‘ve been working hard with scibeh.org to create online workshop formats that emphasise new outputs coproduced by participants during the workshop and beyond. The scibeh.org website contains archives and examples if you‘re interested.
We will also be working with Bonfire.networks going forward to do all of this in an open source, fedi-space @scibeh @bonfire
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Megan Lynch (she/her)replied to El Duvelle last edited by
@elduvelle Ableism is what slants it. Right now people comparing in-person and online conference options are comparing apples and road apples.
Ableism ensures that all of society makes as little investment as possible into accessible options (as you can see by how we're not learning lessons from the pandemic, rolling back most online options & training & development of online pedagogy/event planning). #Conferences #Ableism #Pedagogy #AcademicAbleism