Amid a rapidly developing, accelerating, and unprecedented global outbreak of disease caused by novel coronavirus, several health and medical societies cancelled planned events with hours to spare. On Friday March 6, many people were preparing to head to Boston for the International Antiviral Society-USA (IAS-USA) Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI; March 8–11); some attendees were already on their way. However, despite reassurances early in the week that the conference would take place, on Friday lunchtime (for those in the USA) the organisers made the difficult decision to cancel the face-to-face conference and to attempt to run the conference as a virtual event. This was a bold move, but one that, by-and-large, paid off, and provides numerous lessons for other conference organisers as the covid-19 pandemic stretches into the spring and summer. We suggest any conference organisers considering a similar move seek advice from the CROI team on running a successful online conference.
One obvious lesson is to make the decision to go virtual as soon as possible. Although many people would have cancelled travel plans as the covid-19 situation worsened, a few attendees did make it to Boston expecting to attend the conference. Attendees whose travel options are restricted by cost and who cannot travel around peak times could be the most likely to find themselves stranded in a distant city with no conference. The cancellation of the live meeting coincided with the identification of three cases of covid-19 linked to a Biogen conference in Boston a few days before; and during CROI a slew of other cases linked to that conference were identified. Conferences, particularly infectious diseases conferences, should be quick to cancel in the time of an infectious diseases emergency.
CROI made a decision to run prerecorded speeches matched up to slide decks. This approach had several benefits: speakers from Australia were not speaking into their laptops in the early hours; and doing this sidestepped the inevitable problems of trying to establish a sequence of live connections. However, this approach did make for somewhat flat presentations and precluded the opportunity for question and answer sessions after the presentations. As the conference progressed, more speeches were delivered live, and some sessions did manage to host discussion sessions with approaches involving individual email addresses for each room or a twitter hashtag that was rapidly overloaded. No doubt the organisers would have numerous ideas for better solutions given more time.
To cater to the different timezones, CROI did immediate rebroadcasts of each day of the conference, from 2000 h to 0800 h. This was a great idea. In terms of ongoing access, the organisers plan to have all the sessions online a week after the event. But in their bid to be responsive to audience feedback, a particularly stellar session on SARS-CoV-2 and covid-19, was online within an hour of it finishing.
For many people, the academic conference industry seems to be an unnecessary extravagance in the time of the global climate crisis. For years people have talked about possibilities to develop online formats for these meetings and cut down on the contribution of health and medical conferences to greenhouse gas emissions. And as meeting technologies improve, increasingly there seems to be less justification for the global gatherings of thousands and tens of thousands of people. Moreover, conference attendance can be a costly business, prohibitively so for some; perhaps more virtual or online conferences would improve access for people with limited resources. Online conferences can also make conferences accessible for people in countries that face travel restrictions, whether they are imposed because of a global pandemic or more run of the mill geopolitical machinations.
So, could 2020 be the year that proves our readiness to do away with the academic conference? Perhaps not.
CROI pulled out all the stops and did some laudable thinking on the hoof to come up with solutions to problems as they arose and to improve the way the conference worked as problems were identified. We applaud the organisers and the tech team for pulling off a conference in a new format in what must have been fraught conditions. However, the lack of face-to-face interaction, the missed opportunities for chance meetings, and the isolation will not appeal to many. 2020 might not be the end of the in person conference, but it might help people to think more creatively about virtual approaches that increase online access for people who cannot or do not wish to travel.
For the CROI webcast on SARS-CoV-19 and covid-19 see https://special.croi.capitalreach.com/