I was supposed to start writing something serious this evening (which I have been postponing for last couple of weeks, but who’s counting). So as you can imagine, I am not going to write that today, too. Anyways, this is one of the ways that I trick my mind to work on topics that are not really “work” but very close to it.
So, I wanted to write briefly on organising an online conference from a developing country in the covid 19 pandemic (hence the title). Obviously, we did not have a lot of money and resources to buy expensive private hosting or hosting on university learning management system, as it has been the case with many conferences in the Western countries. That’s why we tried to keep the budget as low as possible and looked for cheaper or free alternatives.
But this was not the only issue. We did not have much technical expertise, too (both in terms of organising and presenting in an online manner). The conference was supposed to be hosted at a university in Pakistan. But from the year start it was clear that it won’t happen the usual way.
The technical expertise on the organising side were procured by asking colleagues to volunteer (who happened to be computational linguists, and me, a corpus linguist). The computational expertise of the organising committee helped in finding resources and devise methods for the online conference:
We used email for communication (as is the case with every online or offline conference).
We decided to set up a separate Gmail account for the conference and used 15 GB space in Google Drive to host videos before they were published.
We used Google Firebase platform, which has a free quota, to host videos for streaming.
We bought (for about $ 235) two meeting slots and one webinar slot from Zoom for one month. There were two parallel conference sessions and the plenary sessions were organised through the webinar slot.
We asked the presenters to record their presentations using the record presentation option in Microsoft PowerPoint (Slideshow > Record Slide Show). The use of audio format by a vast majority of the presenters made sure that they could upload their presentations hassle-free without worrying about large-size videos and slow internet speeds.
These presentations were converted into videos by yours truly and then uploaded by another colleague (and their student helpers) to Google Firebase platform.
The videos were then embedded on an HTML page on the conference website, for which the link was sent to the participants through email. (Not a very intuitive solution but it worked.)
The conference parallel sessions would just have 10 to 15 minutes per (already uploaded) presentation for questions and answers.
This online edition of the conference (ICLAP2020) gave us ideas for the future editions:
It was easier and cost virtually nothing to invite international speakers for plenaries and workshops in an online format. Future editions will also include international speakers in the same format.
Similarly, it was easier for presenters from abroad to present in the conference without flying to Pakistan.
As you might have guessed, it was not as smooth as it appeared. We also faced many problems, and realised later on that many things could be done differently.
Normally, a conference (when it is organised at a university) is run by many more colleagues so the work is divided. For this online version, we did not have that luxury which sometimes created bottlenecks.
We could not make sure that the videos arrive well before the conference start date so that they could be checked and uploaded, and hence be available for the conference participants to watch.
We did not add any virtual social events (Zoom breakout rooms?) which made the whole experience kind of dry and un-interesting.
We could not communicate the conference format in an effective way (videos will be hosted, watched beforehand and the presenters will make themselves available in the respective session for question answers). These discussions were mostly led by the session chairs.
We organised this conference, we found many new and useful ways for the future and also learned lessons to improve the upcoming editions.
