Videos are now up for AGONIZE. I’ve committed to organizing another one of these — stay tuned for more info.
Since this was one of the first math conferences of our new era, I wanted to write a brief reflection on what worked and what (in my opinion) didn’t work.
Technical Aspects
The conference was run as a Zoom meeting — UGA’s Zoom license can accommodate meetings of up to 300 people, which turned out to suffice (and one can purchase more expensive licenses which can handle larger groups). I and each of the speakers were “co-hosts” of the meeting, meaning that we could share our screen and had the power to mute other participants. There were essentially no technical glitches, with two minor exceptions: (1) one of the speakers’ iPad’s briefly stopped screen-sharing, just for a few seconds, and (2) there were some minor audio glitches during one of the talks, but nothing that prevented the speaker from being understandable. Overall, this aspect of the conference went much more smoothly than I expected.
The speakers used a variety of technologies to give their talks. Wanlin shared Beamer slides; Padma shared slides and the switched to writing in the iPad’s Notes app; Hannah pointed a webcam at a blackboard and lectured from the board and then briefly shared a pdf containing some more involved pictures; and Isabel screen-shared from the iPad’s notability app. All of these techniques worked reasonably well — I thought lecturing from the board went surprisingly well, except that colored chalk didn’t show up so well. Isabel’s solution of pre-writing part of her talk in Notability and then filling in parts of it to give a more interactive feel was really excellent, and I plan to imitate it in the future.
I think recording the talks worked well also, as you can see from the videos.
Attendance and Interactivity
Over 250 people registered for the conference — there were between 110 and 130 attendees there at any given time, with people dropping out and others arriving halfway through. The conference took place only a week after it was first advertised (on Twitter, Facebook, Ravi Vakil’s and Kiran Kedlaya’s conference lists, and the Women in Numbers mailing list) so I think this was fairly reasonable.
Overall the audience was well-behaved — large Zoom meetings like this run the risk of being overwhelmed by background noise from participants who haven’t muted themselves. But most participants stayed muted except when asking questions; there were only a few people whom I had to mute remotely. I was also worried about e.g. trolls joining and disrupting the event (which has apparently happened to some online seminars) but we avoided this. I think requiring participants to register before they received a link to the meeting likely helped.
One thing I found a bit disappointing was the audience’s reluctance to ask questions — we originally had planned to let people click the “raise hand” button and wait to be called on if they wanted to ask a question, but people seemed reluctant to do this. Eventually we ended up with a combination of that, as well as a separate Google Doc for questions and discussion, questions asked in chat, and some people who would just unmute themselves and interrupt the speaker. There was not too much of this last method of question-asking, though, so things didn’t devolve into total chaos.
The Google Doc (which I think was suggested by Ravi Vakil during the first talk) was quite interesting. About 70-80 participants had it open at any given time. It was extensively used during the first talk and then usage seemed to slowly drop off. I think people did find it useful — personally I found it distracted me from the talks, though maybe that’s because I was scanning it for questions to ask the speaker in my role as moderator.
To me this is one of two main unsolved problems regarding online conferences — how should participants ask questions? I’d love to hear any thoughts you have.
Social Aspects
The other unsolved problem, in my view, is how to simulate some of the social aspects of conferences (e.g. chatting with other participants during coffee breaks). We tried a few different things. We briefly tried the “breakout room” function of Zoom, whereby people are sorted into random rooms and have some time to chat. I did hear a few positive things about this, but also that some people were put in rooms with 5 or 6 non-responsive people. One possible solution would simply be to make the rooms larger — with 20-person rooms, probably at least a few people will respond.
People did use the chat functionality in Zoom throughout the conference — it’s a bit more primitive than e.g. Slack or Discord, but it’s OK. But chatting was overall somewhat minimal. The Google Doc also filled some social role.
Finally, after the last talk, about 50-60 participants stuck around to discuss how to organize conferences like this, and to give some feedback. Of the 50-60 people who stuck around, probably around 20 contributed to the discussion, which I found pretty valuable. It’s possible that just encouraging participants to turn on their video and unmute themselves during breaks like this would work reasonably well.
Scheduling
One thing I intend to do differently in the future is scheduling. The conference took place from 12pm-5pm EST because some of our speakers live on the West Coast, but this ended up resulting in 4 consecutive talks with only 15-minute breaks between them. That was too much — I, at least, found it pretty exhausting. In the future, I would try to spread out 4-5 talks over a whole day, and not worry too much about participants making it to every talk. In between talks, we could try various ways of imitating the social aspects of an in-person conference, as discussed above.
Comments?
Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions regarding AGONIZE or its future iterations. Also, please let me know if you have any questions on how to organize something like this for yourself!