Research Comms Podcast: The post-pandemic future of scientific conferences.
“I would encourage folks to play their long game and think about how they’re going to do virtual engagement, not just this year, but in perpetuity.” The American Geophysical Union’s Lauren Parr on the permanent changes that the COVID pandemic has brought to scientific conferences.
Each year tens of thousands of scientists travel all over the world to attend conferences. But this year COVID19 has meant that those events, as we’ve previously known them, have ceased to exist.
Many conferences have responded by shifting their activities online, creating new virtual events where attendees join from the comfort of their own homes wherever they might be.
So what does this mean for the communication of research going forwards? Is it possible to replicate the special magic of an in-person event online? Can meaningful collaborations be forged in chat rooms? Will it ever be possible to return to the old days? Do we even want to?
That is the topic of this week’s episode and over the past couple of weeks I’ve interviewed a number of experts to try and answer some of those questions.
The below interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of space. To hear everything that Raven had to say in the interview please check out the podcast!
Are there any unique challenges to setting up a virtual conference, as opposed to one in person?
For a virtual meeting, I think one of the real challenges is the uncertainty people have in understanding what the session is going to look like and how they’re going to participate. Those types of questions are things that AGU is really looking at. Part of AGU’s strategy has also been to have a more diverse meeting, and to have a meeting that is more sustainable, so we're really amplifying, or accelerating, what we had done in the past as far as pilots go in virtual engagement.
When we're planning, the great part of this for us is that we are considering this for the long term. So going forward, we will always have a very robust way for virtual attendees to participate. It is a bit like building two meetings but what we've tried to do is just focus on our our community, the experience, the things that are really important to them, like how they want to share their science, and how they want to engage. It can't just be that they are being lectured to, they will multitask the same way I do when I'm just lectured to. So the nice part of it is that we've gotten a lot of feedback from our audience, and that gives us a good chance to accelerate the things that were very important to our membership.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
So what sort of things are you going to be experimenting with at this virtual conference?
Certainly there's this pre-recording of people who want to give fifteen minute talks. But the magic that you see at the fall meeting, and at other scientific societies, isn't necessarily the talk, it's the engagement, it's the panel discussion of all of those thought leaders together, talking about a topic. So we're really focused on having our sessions capture that engagement.
Attendees can pick which pre-recorded fifteen minute talks they want to see. But it’s at our oral sessions where there’s the opportunity to bring people together and have a more robust conversation and dialogue around scientific topics. The other exciting thing is that AGU doesn't have to plan everything. We can give people tools for self-organisation and help them plan. But we don't want to get in the way of that serendipity that comes from attending an event and having informal pop-up chats around topics. So we want people to be able to signal to the community, ‘Hey I'm over here, and I'm having this conversation, and I’d love for you to join me.’
So I think it's just as much about the the type of sessions that we do, but it's also about the tools that we are going to provide to the community so that they can do those things themselves.
I think that those chance meetings and conversations that you might have with people is one of the things that people are most concerned about losing in the change from live conferences to online ones. How do you replicate that online?
For AGU the exciting part is that we want to be able to bring the most diverse community into the experience, but we also want to do that in a very safe space. For example, we have a meetings code of conduct that stretch into virtual meetings as well. And there won't be any anonymous trolling, there won't be the ability to question people anonymously or not identify yourselves in a session.
There's also ways where you can pick and choose the groups, or the individuals, that you want to interact with. But at all points we're really considering how we can do that safely. We don't want people feeling harassed, or attacked online, or in a session room feeling like they are either being put on the spot or anything that would go beyond normal scientific debate. So it's important to us to be able to offer that kind of a safe experience, but also be able to move from platform to platform. We're incorporating six platforms in total and your experience would be seamless as you move from one to the other. That's what we're testing and what we're hoping for.
Can you tell me a bit more about these platforms?
I'll give you an example, we have a platform that houses our abstracts, and it can host some pre-recorded content too. So folks can upload their talks, and attach those to their abstracts. We also have our i-poster format, which is really exciting because it gives a really dynamic way to present, whether you are in person or whether you are virtual, you can pop out data sets or look at video. So when I go and look at those posters, it's always exciting to me to see what's embedded in the posters versus a pdf of text, or graphs. It really helps the science leap off the page when you can include more dynamic formats. So our i-posters are certainly going to form the basis of our poster sessions.
We'll still do things like our e-lightning sessions, where people give a two or three minute pitch, and then we'll have a follow-on poster session, so you can decide based on the pitches which authors you would like to visit. Authors will also be able to schedule their own poster hours, so they'll be able to say, ‘Hey, this is my time zone, I’m going to make myself available then, please come and see me.’
But I think the biggest change, and the thing that is probably the most complex for this meeting, is that we really want to offer dynamic content in almost every time zone. For us that means that, for example, if we are in Washington DC, and we're based in DC, we're likely going to start offering sessions that occur at five in the morning for DC time zone, but that really helps Europe and parts of Africa engage in a time zone that's not terribly late for them. We’ll likely run everything through about 1 p.m and at that point it's evening for Europe, they're starting to head offline, and it's certainly very late in Asia. So we would take our big break in the middle of the day US time. Then we would start back up again at about 7 p.m, and we would then be able to pick up Asia, Australia and India, as that's not a terrible time for them to have to engage.
It’s not a US-based meeting, so it shouldn't be a US time zone meeting. Some of that is kind of spreading the love, or the discomfort of having to get up in the middle of the night. But we felt like that was really important.
So presumably you’ll have to be on call for a lot longer than you usually would have been?
I used to joke and say, ‘Wouldn't it be great if we had a month of fall meeting?’ And now it looks like we're going to have almost a month of fall meeting.
We're going to go from December 1st to December 17th, and really spread things out. We know that people cannot devote ten hours a day to attending the fall meeting, not in a virtual environment, it's not best practice, it's not feasible and it's not desirable. Nobody wants that kind of engagement.
So what we'd like to do is spread things out, and break them down, so that you may spend ten to twenty hours at the meeting, but maybe you do it over a period of a couple weeks. That way you can pick things that are most useful to you, and you can do some other things, like view pre-recorded content, at your leisure. But then you'll also have some sessions and some dynamic things to attend that would be live. So our oral sessions will still be oral sessions, and we'll have those live.
As you say, screen fatigue could be a problem with an online conference. Are you giving any advice to your presenters?
We'll be providing some training on best practices in how to engage in a pre-recorded space. Our audio visual providers are going to help us with that. They're going to help us do some training, we have some tutorials about how to put together your i-poster, and how to give your i-poster pitch so that it's exciting.
One of the things we know, with pre-recorded content especially, is that if it's not engaging, people will immediately sign off. I know everyone thinks that they know how to give a great presentation, and they do, but hopefully everyone is going to take some time with putting together a good presentation.
The catch is that you can't do your presentation on the plane on the way to the meeting. So people will actually have to think about that a little bit more in advance.
How are you getting this information about what makes an engaging online presentation? Are there different companies sharing their information, or is it based on your own experience?
There are a number of groups who are really engaged in the online space. The European Geosciences Union gave us great feedback about what worked and what didn’t. We learn from what other communities are doing too. The medical community in particular has a lot of medical online conferences which have been around for a long time. Many societies have been doing online education for at least fifteen years. So they provided a terrific group of organisations for us to take a look at.
Also, the online methodology for teaching is not new. We might all feel like it’s new because we’re having to do it all of a sudden. But these are tried and true ideas that have been around for a long time, and the technology is really excellent.
How do you see the future of scientific conferences developing, especially when we are eventually allowed to gather in person again?
I would encourage everyone to play their long game when it comes to virtual meetings.
I think that virtual engagement is an accelerator to a more diverse meeting, and a more sustainable meeting. When you think about the number of people who can't attend on any given year, or who can't afford to travel, who can't afford to join your community, or maybe they choose not to travel because of carbon footprint, or because of time, or because of their family commitments. There are so many barriers to actually coming to the meeting.
The virtual meeting removes so many of those barriers. It gives you a chance to include people who've never come before, and introduce them to this community of people that all of these societies have. That's something that I think is more than just a 2020 phenomenon. I think it's something that could really change the face of conferences going forward, as those new participants have a chance to contribute to content, to share their ideas, to teach and then bring back scientific knowledge to their own communities.
So I would just encourage folks to play their long game, and really think about, not only how are you going to do virtual education and engagement this year, but how are you going to do it in perpetuity.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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