This site explains how we run the SNUFA annual online workshop, so that others can easily re-use it.
Note that although there’s quite a few steps to learn the first time you run it, the second time onwards it is very low effort in terms of hours. Also, the cost is negligible.
Outline¶
Note that you are of course welcome to make any changes you like, this is just a suggestion based on how we do it.
- Find a core team of at least two who know how to run all parts of the conference.
- Find an executive committee, this can rotate every year. We choose new exec committee members from previous years’ speakers.
- Organising with the executive committee
- Decide on a schedule
- Set up the website
- Invite speakers
- Abstract submissions
- Registration
- Approval voting
- Finalise schedule and update website
- Communications
- Running the event live
- Uploading videos
- Time zones
Organising with the executive committee¶
We use a very crude and simple system but it’s fine for what we want to do.
We have a shared Google Doc with the following headings:
- Things to do (bullet point list)
- Executive committee (starts as ideas, ends with the agreed list))
- Structure of workshop (number of days, invited speakers, etc.)
- Invited speakers (starts as a list of ideas and settles down to a list)
- Invitiation email template
- Scheduling
- Annual schedule (submission deadlines etc.)
- Availability (who is available for chairing sessions etc. on what times and days)
- Workshop schedule (evolving towards table of final schedule including who is chairing and doing backend on each session)
- Registration (sometimes just a link to eventbrite)
- Communications (e.g. email announcements, social media template)
Deciding on a schedule¶
We do a two day workshop every year, from 2-6pm CET as this allows for a fairly wide range of people to take part (e.g. including USA).
In our case, we aim to do it near the beginning of November, which seems to work well, but this is field specific.
We aim to announce about 6 months in advance, with days and submission deadline decided, a website, and any infrastructure for registrations and abstract submission in place. See also Communications (email and social media).
We set the abstract submission deadline about 6 weeks ahead of the workshop.
We then have a two week period for the Approval voting.
And this lets us give the final schedule to speakers at least 2 weeks in advance.
Invite speakers¶
Ideally, aim to give your invited speakers at least 6 months advance notice, preferably even more.
We aim to have one invited speaker per session, and then two contributed talks. The invited speaker is usually a “big name” who will feature in the promotional materials (see Communications (email and social media)) and encourage people to participate, and join that session. We try not to always invite the same people, and to have a bit of a mix or rising stars and big names.
Also, make sure you don’t end up with an all male list of invited speakers. This is bad.
Once you’ve decided on the final schedule, send speakers a calendar invite with link. This has two advantages. It will appear on their calendar and it will automatically handle time zones correctly. THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL! Everyone makes time zone mistakes! If you want it to run smoothly, do this.
Abstract submissions¶
Decide how complicated you want this to be and use an appropriate solution.
For SNUFA, we decided on low effort. We use Microsoft Forms with the following questions, although Google Forms, Qualtrics, etc. are fine too):
- Corresponding author name
- Corresponding author email address (make sure you will be available to respond to emails in the period XYZ)
- Presenting author name (leave blank if the same as corresponding author)
- Presentation title
- Presentation authors (please write a comma separated list with first letter capitalised, e.g. “Dan Goodman, Friedemann Zenke”)
- Abstract (please keep under 300 words). Please do not include details that will compromise anonymity.
Under the form settings, make sure anyone can respond, optionally set a start and end date, etc.
After the submission deadline you can download everything as an Excel or csv file. This is useful if you use the Approval voting code we provide.
Registration¶
TODO more detail.
We use Eventbrite which offers a free service. Note that it will handle your emails (see Communications (email and social media)) and keep lists of previous participants you can email as part of your announcements.
Communications (email and social media)¶
TODO more detail.
- Social media (X, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Facebook)
- Email lists (we do comp-neuro, connectionists, neurotechai.eu, capocaccia)
- Chat servers like Discord, Slack, etc.; we run one for SNUFA, but also announce of the Brian Discourse server
- Do announcements a long way in advance, and a couple of weeks before submission deadline
Running the event live¶
TODO much more detail
- CrowdCast
- Zoom
- Discord side-channel for organisers
Uploading videos¶
TODO more detail
- Crowdcast
- Youtube
Time zones¶
TODO