Comments Please!

[Ken Eguro]

This year’s virtual FCCM was put together hastily, due to the rapid escalation of COVID-19 in North America. Although you should submit any technical support issues to support@fccm.org, we may extend the virtual conference format in the future. Thus, the organizing committee would like feedback. For example:

Are there any features you would like to see in coming years?

Perhaps the asynchronous format didn’t work for you and you would prefer a live meeting, even if that means being up in the middle of the night to participate or bearing with technical problems such as network connectivity issues?

Maybe we should go to a hybrid model where we expand our live presentations beyond the workshops to the technical sessions, for those who can make it, and provide off-line recorded videos for those who can’t, even if that means that attendees will experience the conference differently (and perhaps may require different platforms that may not integrate with each other)?

We had to axe the popular Sunday Panel discussion because active audience participation is difficult over teleconference. Are there formats that you think might work well remotely?

Were the live remote workshops set up well? What sort of content worked or did not work?

Let us know!

[alex.forencich]

Many thanks to Ken and Dustin for setting up the conference site and keeping it running like a well-oiled machine! (Or maybe a well duct-taped, bubble-gummed, and bailing-wired machine?)

Here is a video of them editing PHP on the fly:

At any rate, I liked being able to have time to compose questions and responses as well as having more control over the talks – watching them out of order, skipping around, consulting the talk and the paper at the same time, etc. However, what would be nice is more live discussions of some form. Not sure what format would make the most sense, though. Maybe a block of time for live Q+A or general discussion for each session or something along those lines. It might also be useful to have some kind of incentive to get discussion going on the forms during the conference so there can be plenty of eyeballs on the discussion.

[David Andrews]

Alex,
Thanks for the comments. I agree that the next iteration should consider how to achieve a little more blending of live interactions with forum postings.

Cheers,
David

[Yaman Umuroglu]

How about enabling viewing statistics for the videos for the next iteration? This would give the authors a bit more feedback in terms of audience interest.

[David Andrews]

Hi Yaman,
Thanks for the comment. I think this would be nice feedback and validation for the authors. We did discuss this in our steering committee meeting and it should be included in some form in the future.

Cheers,
David

[Rajesh Kedia]

I am attending FCCM for the first time (have attended other conferences though) and I liked the virtual format a lot. I guess, this is a new futuristic direction for the conferences. The hybrid option would also be nice to explore, once situation becomes normal.
Thanks a lot.

[David Andrews]

Rajesh,
Thanks for the comment and glad to hear you enjoyed your first FCCM! Our hope is that we can blend the best of both physical and virtual formats into future conferences going forward.

Cheers,
David

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