InterPore2020 Conference Feedback

After InterPore2020 had finished, participants were asked about their experience. It was the first-ever online InterPore conference, due of course to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to affect international conferences in the years to come to some extent. Hence, it is vital that lessons are learned from InterPore2020. What should be improved and what is for keeps? Trends and observations from your responses are listed below, but first a few numbers.

During the conference, we gathered the following statistics:

Agenda
19,513 Total Session Views
576 Personal Agendas were created by participants

Networking
13,151 Profile Views
530 Private 1-on-1 meetings were created between participants
45 Group Meet-Ups were created with a total of 415 participants
35 Job Openings Posted by 13 Companies

Scientific Program
The scientific program was generally perceived as good – very good. However, because of scheduling, some had to jump from one Q&A session to another, for example the two invited talks, which were scheduled in parallel and ought not to have been the case.

Technical Aspects
The Whova-environment ran as an application on mobile phones/tablets and was accessible from a browser on a regular computer. However, the functionality was not the same, with the main emphasis towards mobile phone users. This caused confusion. For example, a clear link between a Q&A session and the talks being discussed in that session was missing. Another potential source of confusion: Questions could be posted to the Q&A session chat option as well as to a chat option on the video page.

Overall, no technical glitches are reported, but the implementation of the conference in Whova was not always intuitive.

General comments
A real major benefit of online conferences is the ability to watch recorded talks. Quite a large group of participants continued watching talks after the conference was closed. Even registration occurred after the conference was closed. However, watching many talks before the conference started was not possible. Effectively, it became almost a two-week event.

The general response is that the scientific content was very good and there is some room for improvement for the technical and practical aspects of an online conference.