I thought it was a really innovative and progressive format, and I’m sure it will be used as a template going forwards.
I really loved being able to watch talks in advance and pause/rewind as many times as needed.
• Watching pre-recorded talks as well as Slack discussions lead to typically much more in-depth thinking and discussing about the talks than I’ve had at offline conferences.
• Meeting with people for break-out discussions in Sococo worked very well. Since they were organized via Slack, that made it very easy to have a joint discussion between all conference participants who are interested/have something to contribute. Scientifically, I gained the most from these break-out discussions as well as some of the themed discussions.
• Having live talk discussions and themed discussion sessions on alternating days worked very well. It allowed me to distribute the talk watching quite evenly over the conference without getting too tiring thanks to the themed discussions in between.
• The suggesting and scheduling of themed discussions during the conference worked great!
• For me, the overall number of talks and discussions was large enough to experience this as a full-time conference, while still allowing for enough flexibility when needed.
Discussion in Slack workspace was very effective for me because there I could ask and discuss with anyone in anytime. This online conference gave the feeling of ‘real’ conference.
I very much enjoyed the format of the conference, and that it was able to prerecord talks, and listen to talks in your own time. I also enjoyed the themed discussion sessions, and that everybody was very friendly at the conference.
I like that the talks are pre-recorded such that during the conference there is more time for questions and discussions. The fact that all the videos for the talks and the discussion recordings are available make people follow all the events, like parallel sessions, that they cannot directly attend. Moreover, I like the Slack space, where further discussions can begin without being constrained by the timetables. At last, I like the times dedicated to social games, where people can take a break from physics, and the style of the Sococo space, which looks like a real conference building!
I think the concept is really good and overall everything worked very well with Slack, Sococo and Zoom.
I really liked the format of integration of Slack and Sococo. To be able to be part of concurring discussions and to be able to see what people are commenting on talks was a really thing and I loved to read the comments!
It was amazing! The talks were very interesting, everyone at the conference was very open minded, supportive and respectful. Especially the (many) themed discussion sessions were very useful and inspirational to attend.