Instead of journal club, today our group does a thought experiment: Imagine all conferences are cancelled for two years. What should we do to replace the functions they serve? I am really interested to see what comes out of this.

I will start out with a few notes on the purpose of conferences. Did I miss something?

Take away points: Virtual seminars are great and important, but they are only replicating part of the purpose of conferences. Many of the networking aspects of a conference may be much harder to move to a virtual setting.

The technical solutions likely exist, but the challenge will be to get people to accept virtual networking events as something useful.

Also, we are missing the fortuituos encounters of sitting next to someone at lunch or in the conference bar. Also, when you select virtual talks to attend, you do not happen to hear a talk on a related topic just because it was before the one you were interested in.

It is not just bad news: Virtual event broaden participation, at least if the organisers do not expect the same fees as for a physical conference. Suddenly, we can bring the whole lab to a conference rather than one or two...

Finally, it will be important to maintain events where speakers are chosen from abstracts through an open call. Otherwise, we easily end up just inviting the people we know have a great story. (Not a criticism, I an guilty of this as well).

But the real challenge will be to maintain the personal side of things. Conferences are currently the main mechanisms for building your international network. This will be hard to replace in digital format, but we might have to try.