Claus Aranha @ Tsukuba University

This week I have been participating in #summerschool, which is an online workshop organized by members of scholar.social, which is a server in the "fediverse" distributed social network (which some may know as Mastodon).

So far, I'm really impressed about the intense parallel chats during the talks, and the animated and lengthy Q&A session afterwards.

My recent experience with online conferences (GECCO, and to a lesse degree ALife), is almost no side chat, and almost no questions afterwards, basically a one-way video conference. Since I believe one of the main roles of conferences is exchange knowledge and building community, I am very interested in thinking about what works for #summerschool, and what can be applied to other academic communities I'm part of.

I have thought a lot about it yesterday and today, and I grouped my thoughts loosely as follows. Note: A lot of the notes below are gut feelings, and anecdotes, backed by no hard data. I welcome conversation on these points, and your own observations! I also love all events mentioned below, even when I criticize them.

Timing and intensity of talks:

• Quick facts: #summerschool has 37 talks spread over 2 weeks (including weekends). Each talk is ~15 minutes, with 10-20 minutes of discussion. There are about 1-3 talks per day, spread over several time zones.

• This is a relaxed pace, and I think this is definitely a big factor. Watching several talks in a row is exausting, and we want to swiftly move to the next talk without giving discussions their due space. This is compounded when the conference is several days in a row. I was exhausted in GECCO after 2 days, ALIFE after 4 days.

• On the other hand, short talks with a lot of time between them give us time to relax, decompress, live our lives, and build excitement for the next talk. This last one for me is a big factor.

• Very short talks spread over several days helps fit talks in my work day. And makes it less annoying/invasive to attend a talk during the weekend.

• Current online events try to be virtual twins of in-person effect. The assumption is that you will switch to "event mode". This marathon works when you travel to a different city and are surrounded by different people, immersed in the conference. For an online conference, it seems like most people will not pause their daily routine for the online conference, making it too intense.

Buy-in of the speaker:

Why do we do talks at conferences?

• #summerschool has no review process, minimal guidelines or theme, BUT also a strong messaging of "share your knowledge with the community". What people talk about?

• From the talks I participated: Advocacy talks (this sucks and we should change it), Knowledge Sharing, PhD defense practice. In all cases, people presented things they really wanted to talk about with others, and I could feel that energy.

• Standard (CS) conferences: We want our papers accepted and added to our curriculum. The talk is an afterthought / victory lap / price to pay.

• Or small, no-review workshops to gather feedback (hi Alife-Japan!). But even in Alife-Japan I often feel that the talk is tied down by the expectation of regular academic conferences.

• What could be done to make students to talk about things they are really passionate about? Probably something to do with Mike's paper on researcher motivation.

Community and Scale:

• #summerschool does not have a clear theme. The theme is: people from the same community talking to each other.
• However, I definitely did not know many of the people whose talks I watched, so it does not need to be a super tiny community to work, and the "get to know new people" factor is there.

• Thinking about size: 37 talks is maybe half the size of ALIFE, double the size of Alife-Japan?

• Cool thing: During the "talk proposal" stage, many people were creating threads asking for suggestions about their talk. These threads usually took the shape of pools, where the prospective speaker suggested 3 to 4 alternative titles/topics for their talks. These threads raised awareness, and maybe motivated the speakers too?

• Scale is definitely a factor. 1-3 talks a day seems a nice pace, so bigger community means a month-long online conference.

• The community has "clear" rules of acceptable and not acceptable talk:

• Code of conduct is obvious. Proeminently displayed during topic submission and participant registration.

• But the underlying social network (scholar.social), has unwritten, implicit rules about what people are expected to talk about (academic life, writing, mental health, day to day as an academic, etc), and things to avoid talking about too much (spoiler tags).
• Community prompts (@oneabstractaday)

• Not perfect, but pretty good. Explicit and implicit expectations makes it easier to interact with the community. Compare with twitter where the topic is "anything, whatever".

• I think having an underlying community might be a key for the success of a slow-paced workshop. ALIFE has the ISAL slack, but no one uses it. I imagine it might be because no one quite knows what is expected behavior, what is off-topic behavior? Alife-Japan doesn't have a space to talk about outside the workshops.

Other

• The web tools used by #summerschool are really, really sweet. Pleasant to the eye, easy to understand, not bloated, and responsive. (I'm looking at you, Whova.)

Parting thoughts

• Events that are spread out over many weeks, and that try to push buy-in to speakers and participants.
• It might be hard to do this in very large events (GECCO), but is feasible on smaller ones (Alife-Japan). I am not sure how much could be doable for Alife.
• Fostering a shared, asynchronous space for a community to speak freely (not only about academic matters) during the whole period might help connect a longer event, create shared culture, etc.
• On a different note, I do enjoy the fediverse as a place for academic discussion in general, and recommend others to consider joining. Choosing a good instance is pretty important. scholar.social is closed for signups at the moment, but another instance dedicated to scientific communication is scicomm.xyz. There are probably a few more if you look for it.