Conferences that have gone virtual have mainly used a dedicated conference website and Twitter to communicate information to particpants about how and when presentations are scheduled. Poster sessions, that have been held virtually have used two different modes:
- twitter poster conferences such as #RSCposter or the Photonics Online Meeting
- poster available on a dedicated website for download and a messaging app like Slack is used to link poster presenter and audience for specific questions such as NanoGE conferences
- Setting up a good conference website takes time especially when interactive elements such as virtual poster sessions are involved. Wordpress or University provided content management systems do not provide the required plugins to e.g host a virtual poster session. No commercial solutions exist.
- Coordination across time zones is not easy. Maintaining text documents of the schedule in different timezones is cumbersome and presenters are most likely located on at least two different continents
- Poster sessions on Twitter are not well indexed and the twitter algorithm favors those that already have high follower counts. Due to governmental restrictions Twitter is not available everywhere in the world.
- Should the material presented at the conference be available in the long term? How is it preserved?
- Less carbon used because no travel required
- Potentially bigger audience because people that can't travel or that are only interested in part of the event attend.
- Global equity as anybody with computer and decent internet can participate regardless of personal connections and funds.
- Researchers with caring responsibilites can participate easily in the conference.
- Technology opens new possibilites for interactive poster presentation with live code, interactive molecular visualization or other elements such as gifs, videos, maps with data overlay etc.
- Presented posters could directly be archived on zenodo or osf.io and linked with one's ORCID thus strengthening open sharing and long term preservation of knowledge.
Based on my survey there is only a limited a amount of virtual conferences that have used a tailored system to manage the conference.
Examples are e.g the cold spring harbor laboratory virtual events (Example CSHL Meeting) or the NanoGE conferences ( NanoGE). NanoGE makes it possible to use their system for conferences but within the NanoGE domain. These platforms use a combination of their website, video conferencing software and chat apps for the poster sessions (Slack, RocketChat). For virtual poster sessions there is a basic online hosting of posters available here: Virtualpostersession.org but there is no commenting function and interactivity is done using a link to video chat with the poster presenter during the poster session.
The Photonics Online Meetup which is a big online meetup with over 1100 attendants in its inaugural january 2020 edition has relied on Twitter and a simple Wordpress site for the meetup (POM Website).
A static system if you have a very large conference is miniconf which powered the ICML 2020 conference, with over 6000 particpants mini-conf.github.io/
Currently, there is no one-stop shop for hosting and managing a virtual conference with poster sessions on a single platform without manual labor to create e.g poster rooms in a message board.
Such software will be necessary to increase the amount of virtual conferences being held in the scientifc community as it will massively lower the barrier for organizing such an event.