This past weekend was the first-ever WAGON conference (Western Algebraic Geometry ONline), which was meant as the online iteration of the Western Algebraic Geometry Symposium (WAGS). Here “Western” refers to the western United States (which is typically the area from which WAGS draws attendees), but the conference ended up attracting participants from all over the world — I think it was plausibly the largest algebraic geometry conference since the Utah mega-conference in 2015, with over 1000 registrants and up to 700 participants there at any given time.
The conference was organized by Jarod Alper, Isabel Vogt, and myself; I joined, despite not living in the western US, because of my experience organizing AGONIZE (which was one of the first online AG conferences to take place after the COVID pandemic began). I wanted to use this thread to discuss what worked and what didn’t, what I learned from both AGONIZE and WAGON, and to summarize and discuss some comments from participants. I’ve tried to focus to some extent on areas for improvement, even though I found the conference to be an extremely positive experience, since that’s what I think this kind of document is useful for. And I am writing from the point of view of an early-career faculty member, so while I’ve tried to be sensitive to the concerns of e.g. postdocs and graduate students, as well as those of more senior people, I’ll inevitably miss some things — please know that I welcome comments or suggestions, either in the comments below this post or via email. You can reach me at dlitt[AT]uga.edu.
Table of contents
The conference poster
Technology and participation
The conference was hosted with a Zoom Webinar 1000 license, generously provided at no cost by Stanford. This license can accommodate up to 1000 non-video participants at any given time, as well as up to 100 participants with video; Zoom automatically handles registration, and sends a link to each registrant. Over a thousand people (1105, to be precise) registered for the conference, and I would guess that about this many people dropped by. At any given time, there were 200-700 participants. The median session had 400 unique viewers, though the plenaries were consistently well over this. Despite the large number of participants, there were no issues with Zoom-bombing or bad behavior. Participants came from all over the world — one attendee, joining from Japan, mentioned that he had begun adjusting his sleep schedule several days prior so that he could be awake for talks taking place at 330am local time.
Unlike an in-person conference, WAGON cost nothing to organize (or attend); depending on one’s institution and the size of the conference one is planning, the Zoom Webinar license might cost on the order of 1000-2000 dollars. It was organized over the 3-4 weeks prior to the event.
The conference was advertised widely, on the usual mailing lists and conference websites, as well as more recent innovations like mathseminars.org, but not, I think, more widely than the usual pre-COVID conference. In part the massive participation speaks to the low barriers to attend the conference — no travel required — but it speaks also, I believe, to a real need in the community.
The format of the conference
The event consisted of two hour-long plenary talks (delivered by János Kollár and Claire Voisin), six 25-minute talks (delivered by Nick Addington, Juliette Bruce, Johan de Jong, Ariyan Javanpeykar, Valentijn Karemaker, and Mauricio Velasco), two panels, and various social events.
The conference schedule
The talks
The talks were of the highest quality. All of the speakers except for Voisin opted to use slides, with some of them annotating the slides (using a stylus) as they spoke. Voisin used a whiteboard with a webcam pointed at it, which worked fairly well, though there was initially some difficulty reading what was written (especially small subscripts or when the marker started running out of ink).
One of the major downsides of a virtual conference is that talks lack the interactivity of a usual conference — especially in algebraic geometry, talks tend to be rambunctious, with lots of interruptions from the audience. Technological necessity (as well as the large numbers of attendees) meant that this wasn’t really possible. That said Zoom allows several mechanisms by which attendees can ask questions:
Chat: we encouraged participants to use this primarily to ask questions of other participants, and there was a lively discussion throughout most talks. In addition the organizers generally kept an eye on the chat and scanned for interesting questions for the speakers.
Q&A: the Zoom Webinar format allows participants to write questions which are only visible to the speaker or panelists. From past experience (i.e. AGONIZE) we found that asking the speaker to keep an eye on Q&A/chat was very distracting, so one of the organizers was tasked with moderating the Q&A, textually answering some questions, and interrupting the speaker with especially urgent questions; other questions were held to the end. For short talks, all questions were held to the end.
Hand-raising: Zoom allows attendees to “raise their hand,” after which an organizer can unmute them and they can ask a question verbally. This feature was used in some of the talks, though several participants “raised their hand” by mistake.
At AGONIZE we had an additional discussion platform — namely a Google Doc that participants could use to discuss the talk as it went on; this was Ravi Vakil’s innovation. We opted not to use a similar strategy at WAGON because of Google Doc’s serious technological limitations: no more than 100 or so people can edit a document at once, so this technique is unusable for large conferences.
Zoom’s chat is very bare-bones. In particular, participants were unable to chat privately with one another, or even to know who else was in the room with them! In retrospect it might have been better to use an external chat client like Slack or Discord. That said there was usually a lively (public) discussion of mathematical questions which arose during the talks.
I found moderating the chat and Q&A to be quite exhausting. There is a fair amount of improvisation required, and some risk — during Voisin’s talk, my co-organizer Isabel’s internet cut out while she was moderating, though luckily this didn’t last for too long (and my co-organizer Jarod stepped in to fill the gap). One participant suggested that the extent to which the Q&A would be moderated should have been made more clear before the conference — I or others in chat ended up answering some questions which were intended for speakers, which might have been jarring. I think substantial moderation is inevitable in such a large event, but I would love to hear alternate suggestions. I imagine that too-heavy-handed moderation, or its opposite, would have the possibility of harming a talk, though I don’t think this happened to us.
Despite these (in my view minor) difficulties, I found the talks really enjoyable and enlightening, and I think this sentiment was common among the participants.
A screenshot from Nick Addington’s talk.
The social events
One of the major experiments attempted at WAGON aimed to simulate some of the more informal aspects of an in-person conference — meeting random people at coffee, getting lunch with your friends, bumping into a collaborator, etc. We asked a range of people (senior colleagues, graduate students, postdocs, my NSF program officer) to host their own Zoom “tables” during the coffee break, lunch break, and reception. Links to these rooms were posted in a Google Doc; as rooms got more crowded, other participants could (and did!) create new tables on the fly.
The coffee break Google Doc
As participants entered and exited each table, we asked them to put their names on the Google Doc, so people could find their friends, or people to whom they wanted to ask questions, etc. This happened less reliably, though some of the table hosts did regularly update the Doc with the names of those who had joined their table.
Overall I think this experiment was a success — all of the tables I joined had lively discussion, often with 10-15 active participants, and there were 6-8 tables during each break. Discussions topics ranged from mathematics, to COVID, to small talk, to the conference itself. Michelle Manes hosted a Q&A about NSF funding; Will Sawin wandered from table to table searching for problems to solve. It was great.
As far as I know the only technical hiccup was the Google Doc, which hung as hundreds of people tried to edit it. This is a problem which surely has a technical solution. If anyone can suggest (or engineer) one, I would be very grateful.
In the future I would change a few aspects of this system. First, it’s not clear to me that asking participants to record which table they are at is actually useful — for one, I think it is a request which is doomed to be ignored. But for another, I think it to some extent encourages cliquishness, and makes it more difficult to join a table at which you don’t recognize any names. Indeed, some junior participants suggested that they found it intimidating to try to join any of the rooms during the social events.
That said, other junior participants wrote to say that the social events were their favorite part of the conference. Several junior people hosted well-attended Zoom rooms during multiple breaks, and a couple of participants mentioned that they were thrilled to be able to join a Zoom room with the speakers after their talks, so that they could ask any questions which came up.
Dr. Wandering Point (quoted above) also suggested that the coffee breaks were a bit too short, and I agree. At an in-person coffee break one can chat with other attendees while in line; here one had to step away from the computer to make coffee, at which point the break would be almost over.
In general I think we could have done a better job of indicating that it was OK to join a room to just chat, or without a burning math question — again, some junior participants mentioned that they felt they had to have a specific mathematical issue to discuss with their senior colleagues before entering a conversation. I worry that I enjoyed the social events because I knew so many of the participants; if you’re a junior attendee reading this, I’d love to hear what you think we can do to improve the social experience in the future. Of course this issue might not be unique to virtual conferences.
And one aspect of an in-person conference it is impossible to emulate online is the concessions — I think my co-organizer Jarod and I were the only participants drinking a beer during the reception.
My personal experience of the social events was fantastic, and I think they were a clear improvement over not having social events. It was wonderful to see colleagues and friends from all over the world, many of whom I had planned to see in upcoming events that have now been canceled. And I think there is a real need for these kinds of events, even if they are imperfect — I miss the greater math community a great deal, and even if it requires some awkward Zoom silences, I’ll take any time I can get.
The panels
We had two panels, one on “Work-life balance while social distancing,” moderated by Dagan Karp and featuring Laure Flapan, Daniel Hernández, Brian Lehmann, and Sam Payne, and the other on “COVID and the profession,” moderated by Ravi Vakil, and featuring Brendan Hassett, Caroline J. Klivans, and Bianca Viray. The former panel focused primarily on more personal aspects of being a mathematician during a pandemic, whereas the latter focused on where the profession is heading, and what we can do to mitigate COVID’s impacts, especially on younger mathematicians.
Q&A and audience participation worked similarly to the talks; chat was extremely active during the panels and the moderators did an excellent job keeping an eye on it. I found both panels very valuable, and I think many participants took comfort from the fact that the panelists discussed the struggles they’ve been facing during these difficult times.
While I think the panels were both quite useful, especially to those (like me) in reasonably secure positions looking for ways to help those junior to them, there were some real concerns from participants about how these (admittedly very difficult!) topics were addressed. Some junior participants suggested to me that they felt their concerns were ignored to avoid making the panels too depressing, or that questions from the chat were cherry-picked to avoid giving hard answers. And in retrospect it was, in my view, an error to include only tenured faculty on the latter panel. While the panelists had really fantastic insight into the political and financial realities involved in, say, hiring postdocs in the next few months, I think the latter panel might have benefited from a less secure voice. Laure Flapan did an incredible job representing early-career voices on the first panel.
One participant suggested that future iterations of panels along these lines might be “flipped,” with several junior participants and at most one or two senior participants. I would love to see how such a panel plays out.
Scheduling
Weekend conferences
Following the usual WAGS tradition, WAGON took place on a weekend. Nick Addington and others pointed out the irony in having a panel on “work-life balance” during a weekend conference. Especially for those wrangling young kids, it’s difficult to block off an entire weekend to attend a conference at home. Nick suggested that the value of a weekend in-person conference — namely that it’s harder to get away from work during the week — has largely disappeared now that we work from home. Others suggested that they had ways to occupy their kids during the week (e.g. elementary school classes on Zoom), and were parenting on the weekend full time. Possible solutions suggested include: spreading out the conference a bit more — maybe one or two events per day for several (not necessarily consecutive) days, or 4 half-days instead of 2 days.
Of the suggestions discussed (via email, twitter, etc.), I don’t think there was a clear favorite, and in any case the discussion happened too late to significantly change WAGON’s programming. My instinct is that the only solution is to have many different types of events with many different types of schedules, to accommodate as many different lifestyles as possible. No conference can be all things to all people.
Time zones and talk scheduling
Because the conference took place under the WAGS banner, it ran in Pacific Daylight Time, starting at 9am PDT and concluding in the late afternoon PDT. This meant that things were quite convenient for those in the Americas, but that the rest of the world was somewhat inconvenienced. I mentioned earlier that a participant in Japan stayed up into the early morning to attend; anecdotally it seems that a substantial number of attendees came from Europe and Asia, despite the inconvenience.
There was some question as to why we only had two hour-long talks and six short talks, as opposed to the usual WAGS lineup of eight or so hour-long talks. In my view we made the right decision here — all of us have too much screen-time currently, and personally I find attending an online talk much more exhausting than an in-person talk.
Conclusions
It’s impossible to replicate online all that’s good about an in-person conference, and I don’t think that should be our goal. I think we did well at replicating the mathematical aspects of such a conference, and less well at the non-mathematical aspects.
The clear benefit a conference like this has over a traditional conference is the ease with which it can be organized, and attended. Personally, I would like to see more online conferences, even after things return to normal — I think has already begun to some extent (e.g. with the VaNTAGe series).
The main downside WAGON’s talks over traditional (in-person) talks is the lack of interactivity. I think this is a problem which has a solution which is in part technological and in part cultural, and that as we all practice giving and attending online talks we will inevitably see an improvement. I found that the moderated Q&A we used for Kollár’s and Voisin’s talks worked reasonably well.
The non-mathematical aspects of the conference were in my view less of a success, though I still think they were a dramatic improvement over the alternative of omitting them. Many of the problems we faced were magnifications of similar problems faced by in-person conferences. The awkwardness of video chat only makes an atmosphere of inclusivity — already difficult to foster in close proximity — significantly harder to achieve.
One thing I wish we had done is solicit input from more junior people while planning. For people already embedded in the community, it was easy to find friends during the social events, speak up in chat, etc. But I wonder if the facelessness of an online event makes speaking up more forbidding.
We’ll keep experimenting. I think there’s lots of room for improvement, both technologically and organizationally — the next thing I’d like to try is a workshop-type event, modeled after the Arizona Winter School or the Stacks Project Workshop. Please let me know if you’d be interested in helping to organize this, or in running a working group.
I’ve spent a substantial amount of space here talking about criticisms of the conference, but we also received a huge amount of support, much of which I found very moving. I think there’s a real need in the community right now for events like this, and I had a wonderful time. Again, please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or complaints, either in the comments below or via email. I’d love to hear them.