Recently I have started to explore the idea of hosting a virtual conference for a community I'm a part of[1]. I'm still in the very early exploratory phase of the idea. Has anyone attended virtual conferences since Covid? Any thoughts about what worked (if anything) or what didn't work?
Currently I'm thinking the format of the conference would be a flipped classroom model[2]. Each topic will be presented in two sessions. The first session will be a pre-recorded presentation. Each attendee would receive access to all of the pre-recorded sessions a few weeks ahead of the conference. The second session would be a Q&A session with the original presenter held live during the conference. One of the unique challenges of this conference is that the attendees will almost by definition be likely to have poor Internet service at home, so relying on live video presentations for the meat of the presentations would be a bad experience for many attendees. Any gut reactions to this style of conference?
For context, my intended audience for attendees is most likely to be at the earliest stages of interest/knowledge of the topic and are seeking mentors, consultants, and related products. My intended speaker list will be primarily people who are actively doing this as a day job and secondarily vendors who sell related products (as long as they're actually useful products.)
[1] See my profile for more info. Not trying to promote the conference here. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/pajamas.html
I found it to be a very worthwhile experience. We had around 100 participants, around 50-60 at any given time. We had synchronous Zoom lectures with Q&A, "virtual coffee breaks", and a Discord forum for discussion.
Not sure if I have any particular suggestions for your format; ours was rather tailored to academia and I don't have much experience outside that realm. But you're imagining what the experience would be like for attendees, which suggests that your conference would very likely be a success.
You can see a blog post about a similar, but significantly larger, conference here:
https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2020/4/20/wagon-lessons-lear...
I say do it. A lot of people are lonely and not getting enough interaction with others. Not sure I could give you any detailed advice, but I imagine that the experience could be very worthwhile.