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Having survived #ISMB2020, and having experienced a bit of #ASMS2020 and #RECOMB2020 too, it's time for me to reflect on what I think works at virtual conferences and what doesn't. 1/n
The biggest thing that doesn't carry over well to a virtual setting is poster sessions. There are many reasons for this, some of which are easy to fix, and some of which are extremely hard to do anything about. 2/n
At a real poster session, you walk down an aisles, look at posters, and if something catches your interest, you can immediately discuss with the poster presenter, if they stand at their poster. 3/n
A web interface like the one at #ISMB2020, which shows a thumbnail of the poster and the name of the presenter, doesn't cut it. You cannot see anything from the thumbnail, and you don't know most of the presenters yet. You thus have to open poster to see just what it is. 4/n
This problem could be easily fixed by making something more similar to your typical photo gallery, where you can just navigate through all posters in a topic area with the arrow keys. That much better mimics walking down an aisle looking at them. 5/n
That, however, does not fix one of the main problems: posters are designed to be printed in big size and put on a wall / poster board. They are not designed to be viewed on a computer screen. To capture attention at a glance, something akin to a graphical abstract is needed. 6/n
Pre-recorded short presentations by poster presenters worked much better than the actual posters. However, they should be short! The 3 minutes at #ASMS2020 was great. The 7 minutes at #ISMB2020 was way too much given the number of posters. 7/n
One big part of a poster sessions that I found lacking at all conferences was the presence of the presenter. IRL, I can see if people are there. Writing a comment on a poster is not the same as live chat, which again is not the same as having an actual conversation. 8/n
My suggestion would be to have something like a Zoom meeting for each poster track. You then simply need an "online indicator" for each poster, showing if the presenter is on the Zoom meeting. If so, you can pop in and use e.g. a breakout room to have a real-time discussion. 9/n
(Thanks to @simonrasmu for that idea.)
There is still one big problem that I have no solution to: poster sessions serve as a welcome break to walk around after sitting in a lecture room. Virtual poster sessions are not a break from sitting in front of the computer. 10/n
Next topic: pre-recorded presentations. The quality of these was generally very good. If anything it helped level the playing field, with younger presenters often being more tech-savvy and likely doing a second take if they didn't nail it first time. 11/n
