Mastodawn

Aurélien 4d ago

An incomplete list of people excluded from 'international' conferences that are in-person only and aren't streamed or recorded
- People with caring responsibilities
- People with disabilities
- People with health vulnerabilities
- People who don't fly in recognition of climate emergencies
- People who work for orgs with ethical no-fly policies
- People who have their travel disrupted due to climate chaos
- People who only engage with fully open access scholarship (if you have to travel+pay to watch a talk, it's not at all open access, even if a related publication is)
- People who can't leave their country for fear of not being let back in
- People who can't get visas
- Unfunded/underfunded people
- People with unfavourable exchange rates
- People who have limited holidays off work
- People who can't afford it
- etc..

I guess you end up with rooms mostly of academics with travel budgets who are too senior to really do research any more, and research students with stipends. That's fine but the perspectives can feel limited, ungrounded and underinformed.. with a huge environmental cost.

Eleanor Saitta Jul 13

@yaxu
At some point, I went to a pretty interesting seeming security and usability academic conference, breaking my general rule of not bothering with that sort of thing. Basically all the work presented was useless because folks had only studied the work, not done it, and no one in the room had context to call bullshit. Not to mention, of course the general sort of academic ritual of ignoring bad work instead of calling it out, which only helps if you already know what's bad.

Alex McLean Jul 13

@dymaxion Yes I guess the word 'academic' is a strange term that stands for a lot more than 'employed by a university'.. Of course there are some really good academic researchers around but the culture looks pretty strange once you're on the outside.

@yaxu @dymaxion also on the inside tbh

people in Ukraine who are subject to military service or currently in the army (most men and some women)
people in Ukraine who are not officially forbidden to leave but are affected by the war such that they can't effectively participate in remote events (dead, wounded, don't have the resources, time or money).

Thus, for every n potential in-person participants from Russia there could have been some n participants from Ukraine who are excluded by the war (by Russia).

Streams and recordings at least allow some degree of semi-attendance / "lurking"...

Johannes Hentschel Jul 13

@yaxu
@yaxu
This is true. Yet, having participated remotely in hybrid conferences, the hitting each other up randomly over some poster or buffet, or purposefully because someone had asked an interesting question, is yet to find its online equivalent. When you're there physically, well, you're gonna talk to people. Attempts at extending these mechanisms to online during the pandemic (e.g. via wonder.me & co) haven't worked because a) when you're home you have other things to do

Johannes Hentschel Jul 13

in the intervals, and b) people in presence are not going to interact with a virtual platform. I think the idea of having it all online starts from the inaccurate idea that conferences are all about listening to each other's talks (that, we can perfectly do online): No, I would claim their main function is the peer interaction, networking, forming collabs, etc. The idea of full inclusion is at odds with real-life interactions in world-wide communities. Both are important! @yaxu

Jakob Thoböll - R.I.P. Natenom Jul 13

@johentsch
lets take this observation and make it an New questuon: how can we at least partly allow people Lister by the post by
@yaxu to participate in that kind of conference activities too?
- solidarity Tickets
- short term (child)care as part of travel fees
- possibility to travel and attent a conference with your child
- travel expenses for a personal Assistent payed by the Institute

t.b.c.

Johannes Hentschel Jul 13

@jakob_thoboell
Yes, all of those, 100% in favour of enabling participation to a maximum of people, esp. since it can help your career that people know your face... The biggest conference in my (male-dominated) field has been actively working towards better inclusion, including solidarity tickets for weak-currency countries. That's for presenting authors only, but it's a start and at least these topics are being discussed. What follows are financial (and visa) questions...
@yaxu

Alex McLean Jul 13

@johentsch @jakob_thoboell I mean, what about people who don't fly due to environmental reasons? Often conferences glibly have environmental topics while not allowing such people to participate unless the conference happens to be nearby one year. Bonkers.

El Duvelle 6d ago

@yaxu @johentsch @jakob_thoboell
In my field there is a conference called "the green hippocampal conference". When I suggested making it fully online because that's how you make a conference actually green.. most other researchers rejected the idea. 🤷

Alex McLean Jul 13

@jakob_thoboell @johentsch Yep sure but seems like moving deckchairs around on the titanic while preserving the same power structures and underexamined rituals.

Jakob Thoböll - R.I.P. Natenom Jul 13

@yaxu You are right. I am just at the entrance of academic work. I might be able to make structural suggestions in future.
@johentsch

Alex McLean Jul 13

@johentsch Yes hybrid conferences totally suck. We need more imaginative alternatives. They exist!

Conferences really suck for meeting people and forming collabs, you have to cram it in between all these inhumanely intense talk sessions, and if your talk is scheduled towards the end of a conference, you're at a major disadvantage - I at least can't introduce myself 50+ times without losing my mind.

Actually, online fora can be really great for meeting people too, just not when they're attached to/trying to simulate a bunch of people in a conference facility somewhere. I've had many amazing collabs with people I haven't met in person.

That said, in-person meetings are indeed undoubtedly important, so important they shouldn't be wasted on conferences. Dagstuhl-style seminars are _far_ more productive, where you do actual research together for a ~week. How many 1-3 month early career research residencies could you run for the cost of a in-person conference? Much deeper cultural and interdisciplinary connections can be made through those.

The important thing is that running in-person only international conferences is astonishingly damaging, amounting to soft climate change denial while excluding most potential participants. I really think they should be banned.

Johannes Hentschel Jul 13

@yaxu
I agree with all your points except the last. Go ahead, foster these alternatives, convince people they are better, I will support such initiatives for my domain, but oppose authoritarian ideas such as banning conferences.

Ian Douglas Scott Jul 13

@johentsch @yaxu In the longer term (and in society more broadly), clearly part of the problem here is that we need more environmentally friendly methods of international travel.

Solar-powered academic airships! (Well, maybe some other things. But hey, at least consider it...)

Viktor Tokariev 🇺🇦Jul 13

@ids1024 @johentsch @yaxu it could be a multi-week foot trip, some type of pilgrimage with grad students and colleagues through steppes, forests and mountains, culminating in a one-hour poster session.

Ian Douglas Scott Jul 13

@victor_tokarev @johentsch @yaxu "The real value of the conference is talking to other pilgrims as they join you walking along the forest road. So these 'hybrid conferences' where some people fly in and skip the hike can never really work."

Alex McLean Jul 13

@ids1024 @victor_tokarev @johentsch To be fair some of the best international research meetings I've attended have included a hike

Alex McLean Jul 13

@johentsch I'm not advocating new laws. It can happen by Universities pushing their ecological policies a tiny bit further than they already have. Once a few more research orgs/institutions have no- or low-fly policies then it'll be untenable to have short long-haul trips to generic conference facilities to try to talk to people between intensive powerpoint presentation sessions.

doboprobodyne Jul 14

@yaxu @johentsch

I'd be curious to know how gamey programs like https://workadventu.re might be used in hybrid conferences

Virtual Office & Remote Event App | WorkAdventure

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WorkAdventure

@johentsch @yaxu

The interaction with online audiences is difficult and can be partly solved by a person transporting chat questions into the audience in presence, but of course it's not the same.

Yet, live-streaming talks has other benefits, too. It's a cheap way of actually documenting/recording talks (because the actual streaming technology doesn't really add to the cost so you basically pay the documentation anyways, not the streaming).

And it allows for a wider audience, perhaps even outside the scientific community, to participate / witness what science is doing. Which is perhaps not desired by all scientists, because they don't like talking to ordinary people who are too dumb to understand a thing… (and in the same vein would love to be famous as scientists, always with envy to those colleagues who have some reach over the media…)

Alex McLean Jul 13

@nielso @johentsch Making online audiences feel included is just a case of having an online session chair. Then they are ensured a first-class experience.
You can still have regional hubs with in-person audiences, and have mobility grants for early career people to move between regions for in-person cultural and research exchange.
This is all well-tested and can work really well, increasing participation. It is a lot of work though and needs imagination and more experimentation. But the benefits are clear, both in terms of reduction of harm, increased participation and higher participant satisfaction.

@yaxu @johentsch

No need to convince *me* as an event tech solo entrepreneur about streaming. 🤪

Basically all of this has been done and tested during the pandemic.

But except for feeding lousy MS Teams meetings at certain business events in bigger companies, much of it has gone away since then.

My cameras are mostly sitting on the shelf these days.

Yet tomorrow I'll head out for some huge company to do something feeding MS Teams again. Not worth delivering great audio and great image, these get ruined anyways. It's good enough for a multi-million Euros company acting in a world-wide market.

Alex McLean Jul 13

@nielso @johentsch Yes I think the pandemic really set back online events. There was a nice movement towards a hub-based model e.g. ICMPC in 2018 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188825004800

During the pandemic there was a lot of hasty 'moving online' without time to do it well. So everyone has had terrible inhumane experiences are become more resistant to change.

I'm afraid I agree. The livestreams I did during the pandemic were quite high-quality. When I started into this topic already in 2017, nobody was really interested.

I also had a steep learning curve, but even my first streams had at least good audio.

Then all those shitty Zoom conferences with bad laptop microphones and terrible echo cancellation algorithms came up, and people started hating them. Actually to me it is too exhausting to take part in such meetings if they are longer than half an hour or so. My brain is constantly busy making up the information the bad audio doesn't transport properly.

People got used to it too much. Companies use Microsoft products only anyways, so they don't even look for alternatives to Teams.

Remote work had quite some benefits, too, but after the pandemic it was reduced again to a great extend.

juliette Jul 14

@johentsch @yaxu The main difficulty I had when I organized a fully remote conference was that people's time wasn't respected. Like "oh, it's remote? Then you can skip the talks for an hour and attend this meeting I deem more important."
We tried to encourage people to be from home, but that's not workable for everyone.
City-based watch parties worked well for people who could have a good group audio set-up - and that solves your problem too.

Alex McLean 6d ago

@juliette @johentsch Being able to skip talks to attend more important meetings can also be seen as a big advantage.. I guess it's up to the event to programme engaging/important talks, and not overload the programme too much (although that is difficult when there are a lot of nice proposals..), so people are able to attend to more of the programme.

In a given in-person conference day, I can only really give myself fully to a coupe of talks anyway.

Agreed good audio is really crucial.

Elena ``of Valhalla''6d ago

@juliette @johentsch @yaxu I'm somebody for whom going to a conference (in my case tech rather than academic) is a significant effort, so I only go to the ones that I *really* care about *a lot* and remote the rest.

I have to say that the volunteer-run tech conferences I tend to interact with have been quite good at allowing remote participation from way before 2020, and for watching talks that's often as good or even *better* than being in person.

Interacting with talks is also a solved problem that only sometimes fails because of a lack of volunteers.

The big problem is the hallway track. as tech people there are multiple ways that we already communicate online, and they are great (and sometimes used even during conferences), but they just aren't the same thing as in-person, often random, meeting, and none of the solution I've seen trying during these years have come even close.

@yaxu This is why the charter of LOCO (International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing) says it *must* be hybrid and affordable.

https://sicsa.ac.uk/events/loco-2024/#gb-tab-item-ff85514a

Melissa Fehr Jul 13

@yaxu 100%! Thank you for such a comprehensive list.

@yaxu post-2020 even “senior academics + research students” is optimistic — it may have stabilized somewhat but in 2023/2024 it was definitely A Thing that, while the PhD students were being told they had to go to conferences to network with senior academics, the senior academics themselves were frequently opting out (for time/money/health reasons). 🙃

Thar🇪🇺Jul 13

@yaxu fertile women (if conference in the USA in e.g. Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee or other underdeveloped areas where women are denied healthcare in emergencies).

haaflife Jul 13

@yaxu I know this is not a request for additional points but ... "People who are aware that around 1 % of the world are currently infected with COVID, a disease that has a 100% morbidity rate, and value their physical health and intellectual capabilities" should be on there as well

Alex McLean Jul 13

@haaflife wait, covid has a 100% morbidity rate?

haaflife Jul 13

@yaxu sure does. Mostly brain and heart damage, and to a lesser degree lungs, kidneys and sexual organs. Every single time.

Alex McLean Jul 13

@haaflife citation needed

haaflife Jul 13

@yaxu 👍

I offer (video) streaming as a service as part of my event tech business in southern Germany.

Universities never ask.

Either they do it themselves with some media department, or they hire a huge and overly expensive event tech firm, or they don't do it because it is too expensive either way. The latter probably being the case most often.

So, once you've convinced academics that they should live-stream their conferences, you'll find that they probably can't afford it.

And no, a webcam something with built-in laptop microphone via Microsoft Teams is not a proper solution.

unexpectedteapot Jul 13

@yaxu being Middle Eastern is a cocktail of some of these things that make all conferences on Fedi incredibly inaccessible.

Omar Antolín Jul 13

@yaxu Great list! I can add an entry that describes the reason I canceled an invitation and declined another to conferences in the US:

- People who do have a visa but won't use it out of fear of being detained upon entry for an unknown length of time, probably without communication with their loved ones for a couple of weeks, and then deported to a country which may or may not be their country of origin

divVerent Jul 13

@oantolin @yaxu That problem shouldn't even be a thing, but it unfortunately is...

Indieterminacy Jul 13

@yaxu Interesting.

What about the post conference publication?

Alex McLean Jul 13

@indieterminacy I'm not sure of the direction of your question but I think proceedings should be published before the conference, with opportunity for updates in response to feedback. Diamond open access with DOI. No predatory publishers. No PDFs, markdown with possibility of embedded media and interactive figures is probably the best we have at the moment.

@yaxu Boiling down to mostly old white men and young white men with the occasional young black or brown man who happens to be sponsored by old white men. Oh, and the few token women. Grrr.

Ben Clifford Jul 14

@yaxu part of my realisation that I don't want to go to "published peer reviewed proceedings"-style conferences was a very bizarre conversation I had with someone about recording and posting talks, that (briefly) was:

"why would anyone want to watch any of these talks?"

Like I dunno man, ur the one organising the conference.

@yaxu I think this contributes massively towards the demographic in UK tech conferences for both the speakers and the attendees. The same is true for evening tech meetups. I once saw someone asking a tech meetup in Berlin to start a bit later so that people with parental responsibilities would be able to join and the organiser just flat out refused because the start time was more convenient for them and existing attendees.

Jens Bannmann 6d ago

@yaxu
For conferences in the USA, add:
- People from other countries who have written social media posts disagreeing with Trump and who therefore will not risk entering the USA.
- LGBTQIA people from other countries
- Non-white people from other countries

Research Software Asia Aus 3d ago

@yaxu We are 100% online for exactly this reason.

Now the challenge for us to help the attendees build connections with each other...

EinsPossum, Hass-Ära 3d ago

@yaxu also just people who dont want to get Covid and the high risk of lifechanging disability associated with it.

Stephen Kell 3d ago

@yaxu Good points in favour of remote attendance options. I think this message is increasingly being heard... although change takes time and small events will always struggle (AV is hard).

However, a minor quibble (perhaps not *that* minor on reflection): please let's not further entrench the wrong belief that "travel" means "flying". E.g. in Europe, where many people live and many international events are held, it is possible to get around without flying.

Alex McLean 3d ago

@stephenrkell Ah I see what you mean, I didn't mean to imply that. I am no-fly and lucky to have a budget that can cover land transport around Europe, nice and practical when I can combine multiple visits in a shortish round trip.
Most potential international conference participants live places where land transport to international events is very rarely an option though.
AV is very hard to the point of impracticality for 'hybrid' events for sure, but easier for events focussed online.

Alex McLean 3d ago

@stephenrkell I would gently push back on the idea that you are able to 'remotely attend' something or that online and in-person can co-exist well in a 'hybrid' space. I think it's better to either a) have a local event and stream it, or b) have an on-line event, potentially with in-person 'watch parties'. Otherwise things are a lot harder and is generally a poor experience for everyone.

Stephen Kell 3d ago

@yaxu I would include "streaming" among "remote attendance" but that is a matter of definitions I suppose.

I agree that "good hybrid events" is currently a problem without a well-known solution. Not ready to believe it "can't" be done.

Does "local" imply "not international"?

m_on_stair 3d ago

@yaxu

"if you dont record your talk, people who didnt attend cant see it"

you shouldnt need to invoke pity on the various reasons people why people couldnt come. maybe I just didnt have the time. thats a reason enough - record the talk.

(unless you explicitly want to ban recording for a given talk, which there are valid reasons for)

carla joy 3d ago

@yaxu i very much agree with this list and can check more than a few as to why i don't attend these... AND.... i usually don't like my talks being recorded for MANY reasons........... i dunno

Jay Hannah 2d ago

@yaxu all conferences are international if you don’t happen to live there?