CW20 Agenda

For in-person CWs, the days are long to maximise the opportunities for networking, collaboration, discussions, and solving problems across the research software landscape. The agenda that we had spent months organising was packed full of talks, group sessions, social activities and mini-workshops - we originally had 18 mini-workshops scheduled to take place across five sessions.

If we had organised CW20 as an online event from the beginning, there are many things we would have done differently. However, we found ourselves in the position of having to transition from an in-person event to an online one at short notice, so we still wanted to incorporate as much of the original programme as possible. We contacted speakers and workshop facilitators to ask if they were still able to deliver in the online setting. In the end, two of the workshops dropped out, and we were therefore able to shift the others around so that we had 16 workshops across four sessions (with four workshops in parallel for each session).

Because we were now unable to carry out the planned social programme (activities such as visiting the Ulster Museum, a walk around the Belfast Botanic Gardens and of course the conference dinner), we were able to shorten the days and add in further breaks and changeover/buffer time.

We did not organise online social activities during the breaks because the days were still quite long and we thought people would need time away from their screens, but this was ultimately something that participants missed the most from the in-person event.

Breaks were specifically scheduled to allow time for the creation of breakout rooms for the next session.

Sessions

Icebreakers (Networking)

We started each day with an icebreaker to get participants used to the infrastructure and to have a chance to chat in small groups. We asked a couple of yes or no questions for participants to respond to using Zoom’s non-verbal feedback feature, and then randomly assigned them into breakout rooms of 3-4 people to discuss the following prompts which we thought would be both fun and useful:

• What are you reading, watching and/or listening to at the moment (and why)?
• What advice/resources/tools/guides do you find useful for working remotely (and why)?

We then asked participants to write down their answers in the note-taking document during a few minutes of “silent documenting”, which had the added benefit of empowering people to directly contribute to the shared notes (example icebreaker document).

Keynote Talks (Informing)

Keynote speakers were contacted prior to the event to confirm the time, length and format of their talk.

The Chair of the session introduced the speaker and reminded the participants that they could take notes and ask questions in the collaborative notes. A link to the slides was also shared here.

The speaker shared their presentation slides via Screen Share in Zoom, and the Host set Spotlight Video for the speaker so that they would be visible to all participants and in the recording.

During the Q&A, the Chair then relayed some of the questions from the notes to the speaker, and the remainder of the questions were answered in-line within the note-taking document after the session.

Lightning Talks (Informing)

All presenters submitted via Dropbox their slides for lightning talks. We compiled all the slides into a single slide show to maximise efficiency during the session, and the Chair shared them via Screen Share in Zoom. The lightning talk speakers then unmuted themselves to give their talk, and the Chair kept them to time. A lesson learned here is to have a timer (e.g. Cuckoo) visible for speakers to know how much time they have left. This can be done by sharing a Desktop view with both slides and a timer visible, instead of only sharing the presentation window. Again, the Host sets Spotlight Video for the speaker so that they are be visible to all participants and in the recording.

Discussion Groups (Exploring)

The Discussion session was conducted in breakout rooms. We were worried that the nascent process of participants determining which discussion topics are chosen and which rooms the groups meet in could be difficult to manage online, but it went much smoother than anticipated. Participants suggested and signed up to the topics that they wanted to discuss in a spreadsheet (example spreadsheet). The topics that people signed up to were then assigned a Group ID - in this case using the letters of the alphabet. The Zoom Host then created breakout rooms named Group A, Group B, etc. and assigned the people who signed up to those groups to the associated breakout rooms during the lunch break. The groups were pointed to their discussion group reporting document via the “Groups” tab in the spreadsheet, in which they worked together on their speed blog.

Collaborative Ideas (Exploring)

The Collaborative Ideas session was conducted in a similar way to the Discussion session except that the group assignments for the breakout rooms were randomly generated. This time the Group IDs were kept as numerics, so the group that was assigned Breakout Room 1 retrieved their Collaborative Ideas document for Idea Group 1 in the associated spreadsheet (example spreadsheet), and so on. Normally, voting for the best Collaborative Ideas takes place on uCONFLY, but to streamline things we added a “Voting” tab to the spreadsheet and asked participants to simply add their names to the ideas that they wanted to vote for and tallied these up at the end.

You can read more details about how we ran the Collaborative Ideas session in the Collaborations Workshop section of the CSCCE’s guide to Using virtual events to facilitate community building: event formats.

Mini-workshops and Demos (Teaching)

We had 16 Mini-workshops and Demos across four sessions. We used a separate Zoom account for each of the four parallel workshops in each session, with an assigned Host (and Co-host for backup) for handling the logistics of the workshop (managing Zoom, recording the session, pointing to the relevant notes document) and helping the workshop facilitator with any technical issues. We pointed people to the different Zoom room links in the day’s collaborative notes and in the Slack channel, and someone stayed in the main room to help people get to where they wanted to go. A lesson learned is to guide workshop facilitators towards including interaction from participants for at least half of the time, and not just having one long presentation.