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Due to the COVID situation, I have, in the past 2 weeks, been approached by several people whose conferences are being cancelled asking me for advice on how to organize a virtual conference. For the past 7 years, I have been vocal about the OpenSimulator Community Conference, a purely virtual conference held in a 3D virtual environment similar to Second Life (for those who remember what that is). I wrote a blog post about the first one back in 2013. The conference has been held every year since then, and it’s always one of the highlights of my yearly online life.

This post is meant to shed some light over the largely uncharted territory of online conferencing — that is, uncharted for most of you who may read this. Online conferences have been happening for a long time in niche communities, such as the OpenSimulator community, disability communities, and communities that don’t have a lot of money to travel. Since I’ve experienced it first hand with OSCC, I’m going to explain how they work, primarily from the point of view of what it takes to organize them, and make them successful.

I finish this introduction with the bottom line: virtual conferences are less about the technological platform than they are about rethinking and retargetting the things that organizers and participants do into the new media. From the organizational point of view, it’s the same, but different! Continue reading →