The Next Chapter for Scientific Conferences

Scientific Conferences are an essential part of the lifeblood of every professional. We looked forward to these meetings from our earliest student days. We would attend to hear the latest research in our chosen field, be among the first to learn of important breakthroughs and of course, the opportunity to meet and greet the "movers and shakers" changing our world. Then came the worldwide pandemic which upended our lives. Now what?

Many people spent precious months preparing submissions of their latest papers and now lack a proper venue for publication and presentation. What can a society or conference organizer do? Even if the event is months away, can it still be held? How will it change?

The obvious answer is to move the conference online as a virtual or remote conference. But how do you do that?

Not Your Run-Of-The-Mill Webinar

The first knee-jerk reaction is to consider webinar or web conference software. Sounds good at first blush. Then we dig a little deeper and ask some people who have gone down this path.

Webinar software is quite effective for its intended design goals. Webinar software is a great way for people to "call-in" and see a group of slides. Many packages do offer some degree of chat question & answer and polling capabilities. But does it begin to come close to a conference experience, or are we settling for less than we should?

Some Important Questions

Among the first questions you probably want to ask are:

How do you enable meaningful Q&A between the speakers and audience?

How do you enable person-to-person interaction and networking?

How do you enable poster sessions? Breakout Rooms?

Does everyone perform their presentation "live" or are some portions pre-recorded? Which then begs the question: How do you work with hundreds of submitted papers/presentations? How do we establish a workflow that makes this do-able, or are we asking for weeks of hard detailed labor and FTP or other file transfer of huge recordings?

How do you maximize Sponsor interaction so the sponsors receive value for their sponsorship?

Do we keep the same schedule we had or how do things change once we move online?

How do we best accommodate attendees in different time-zones who are now not physically attending (so they are still in their home time-zone)? Is everything "live" or some items available time-shifted so they can view at their convenience?

What new things can we do once we are doing an online conference versus a physical conference? What can we do better? How do we achieve better results?

And finally, what happens with these presentations after the conference? Will it be like many physical conferences where all this important scholarship and discourse is not captured?

Or is there a better approach?

Quality Production

Another important consideration is the quality of the experience and the end product.

You would not hold your physical conference in a less-than-acceptable venue. Should you subject your audience to sit through hours of presentations if the audio/video/production quality is uneven?

We enjoy TED talks for their content but also their production values. We are all familiar with the level of a high-quality Television production. That should be the minimum benchmark for an on-line event; one which delights the attendees to stay, linger, interact and most importantly, come back next year.

The Authoritative Repository

As a former Robotics Scientist and founder of the world’s largest Open Access publisher, the need for a comprehensive authoritative repository has been on my mind for a long time.

Two years ago I launched the project for what is now called Underline Science, establishing the world’s first repository platform for cutting-edge scientific lectures, research, discussions and conference live-streaming.

We are very honored to have more than 30 leading conferences using our platform in the next few months with more than a hundred coming on board as we scale.

We did not start two months ago in response to the coronavirus; we have been honing the experience for two years.

Please feel free to reach out to discuss your next event – whether in person, virtual, or a hybrid.

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