Organizing an Online Conference
Or how to convert a 380+ people conference to an online medium in less than 3 months.
During this pandemic, we all had to adapt to an online work environment. Some people had to transition entirely to a “smart working” situation, others were brought to adapt and embrace hybrid solutions. As I previously explained in my “Remote Teaching: Do’s and Don’ts” article published a few months ago here on Medium, I had to convert the entirety of my Computer Programming class to remote delivery. Luckily (or unfortunately), this was not the only thing I had to convert.
Since 2018, a colleague of mine and I have been prepping for hosting a big conference in the field of music technology: NIME. After the news of the pandemic, we realized that all the preparation work we had done to host the conference at our institution would have been in vain. Considering that the conference had already gone through paper submissions and peer review, though, we felt compelled to try to keep the ball rolling and not shut it down. For this reason, on March 25th we publicly announced that this year’s NIME conference would be held entirely online.
This article is not going to be talking about all the choices and crossroads we were faced with during the organisation of the conference; it rather shares the final setup…
