About online conferences

29 Apr 2020

COVID 19 is forcing a lot of conferences to go online. A few notes about this.

Report from the online conference WAGON

There is a maths conference named WAGS that took place virtually this year, and was renamed WAGON for the occasion. One of the organizers wrote report about it here. It explains what worked and what didn’t.

They used zoom, with a license purchased by a university, which worked well even though they had ~1000 participants (but only a few had video). During the talks, there was a chat channel for all participants. There was a few moderators (session chairs and specialists), that would answer some of the questions, and interrupt the speaker only if needed. The speaker did not need to look at the chat. Seemingly the chat was very active and very useful. They also had some other ways to ask questions, such as the “raise your hand” button of zoom, but it seems that the chat was the main channel for this.

There was also some virtual discussion tables for coffee breaks. This was successful up to some extent but it seems that it needs some more iterations to find a good mix. There are questions like: do you register to get on a table? Do you know the names of the people on the table? etc.

Virtual conference schedule

Conferences going online was a topic before the COVID 19, because of climate change and the impact of flying. We are kind of forced to use it now, and that’s a test that might show that at least some conferences can be virtual. For the moment it seems that the choice for these virtual conferences is to make the same event as before but online, in the sense that the schedules are similar, that there are coffee breaks between talks etc. A question is whether this is the best format. Of course for this year, it’s probably the best because it’s what was planned. But if some conferences stay online, maybe another format would be better.

In particular, I have seen comments saying that attending 7 hours of online talks is even more exhausting than 7 hours of real talks, and I can imagine that. Also I’m not sure whether having lunch on your desk with zoom open is great. But still you want people to “attend” the conference and do not just come back and forth between their usual activity and the conference, both because it is more efficient this way, and also because if one can go out of the conference easily then people will be asked to do it (by their colleagues, by the department etc.) although it’s not what they would prefer.

Maybe a good thing is to gather a few people interested in the conference (from your department or city) and to live the conference together. This is probably a much nicer experience (for post-pandemic times).

Impact of video on climate change

Of course virtual conferences have less impact on climate than flying across an ocean, but what is the impact of it anyway? There is a study by a (serious) French think tank about the impact of digital technologies on the climate crisis, and in particular the impact of video. You can find summary here and the full report there.

A few numbers:

• The energy consumption related to digital technologies is distributed the following way: 45% for production of the devices, 19% for data centers, 16% for network, and 20% for terminal use.
• Digital technologies represent 4% of the greenhouse gases emissions (to be compared to the 2% due to aviation) and will most probably reach 8% soon (which is the percentage of car emissions).
• Out of these 4%, 1% is due to video.
• 80% of the global data flow is video, and this 80% can is then divided into two categories: 60% of streaming-like usage (youtube, netflix, social media etc.) and 20% of visioconferences-like usage.

If you want to measure the impact of your Internet activity, the report mentions the firefox add-on carbonalyser .

By the way, there is a manifesto for taking climate change into account in TCS academic life. It is called TCS4F (TCS for future). It has been signed by ~100 people and some organizations such as the conference STACS.

Another relation between conferences and CO2

Another, more unexpected relation between CO2 and conferences: during talks, the CO2 level and the temperature in the room increase in a non-negligible way, which can explain why it’s difficult to stay awake sometimes.

A full (quite old) twitter thread on this here. Also, a New York Times article about this.