About a month ago, at the beginning of this pandemic, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blogged about Running a Virtual Conference and highlighted Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. See that blog here.

Since then, the research community has started to adjust to this new normal and transition to virtual conferences. This includes the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2020), which was also held online in March. See the recap of that meeting here. 

Recently, the  Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Presidential Task Force, which includes Blair MacIntyre, was formed to provide quick advice to conference organizers suddenly facing the need to move their conference online in light of the social distancing recommendations and global restrictions on travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They released the “Virtual Conferences: A Guide to Best Practices” report that provides concrete advice for events of all sizes. It discusses the tasks required of organizers, specific platforms that can be used and financial considerations. They collected examples of conferences that have gone virtual and lessons learned from their experiences. 

See the Best Practices Guide here. Good luck with your conferences!