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I can speak for the ACL conferences (disclaimer: which I volunteered to organize a couple times) Streaming the talks, having questions via chat, putting all pa

I can speak for the ACL conferences (disclaimer: which I volunteered to organize a couple times) Streaming the talks, having questions via chat, putting all papers and posters online, multiple chat rooms, this is all there. Content-wise you can access everything. And since remote participants don't eat, their fee is a bit lower. There are also experiments on making poster sessions more interactive, but no one wants to use shared headphones in a loud room to talk to the (remote) authors. The real challenge is: how do you get those attending in person to interact with those that are virtual only? Will you take out your phone and hang around in the chat rooms during the break?

dekervin 3y ago
Did something like gather.town had any usefulness or staying power with conference organisers? I thought its stated goal was to create a virtual environment more conductive to the very useful small talk between presentations.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  Gather.Town is currently being used for virtual poster sessions, and in that respect it works well. I've also seen it used successfully for discussion in small groups. There are some disadvantages that keep it from going beyond that: you cannot choose who you want to talk with, meaning you need to stay away from other people at the risk of having to talk to a stranger. And since "virtual" means "whenever you feel like it", there's a good chance that the people you want to meet are not there at the same time as you.