Just finished up a week (virtually) at #ALife2020 and I am so impressed with how it turned out! Major props to both the organizers and the ALife community.

Since lots of us are needing to learn quickly how to do virtual conferences, I'm jotting down some observations: 1/n

Note that these are just things I noticed about the conference and the way I found myself interacting with it. Obviously A) not everyone is the same as me, and B) I can change my future behavior in response to these observations.

Also apologies for this being long and rambling!

1. Having a conference-wide text chat during talks is great. It gives all attendees an opportunity to interact with each other and the ideas in the talk. When presenters pre-recorded their talks, they were able to participate as well. 2/n

This was a nice organic way for people to get to know each other (esp. people who might not feel comfortable injecting themselves into an in-person conversation). I hope we can incorporate this into in-person conferences - I much prefer it to mobbing the presenter at the end 3/n

We got into the habit of doing this on Zoom text chat rather than the conference Slack (presumably because it was more visible). I wish we could have done it on Slack instead - I hadn't realized until now how dependent I've become on Slack reactions! 4/n

2. I feel like I made the same number of new connections I would have in person, but they weren't the same people I would have met in person. This was mostly good! The set of people I met felt less biased by the set of people I already know, so more equal-opportunity. 5/n

But there are also people I feel like I "should" have met (e.g. new students of friends/colleagues) that I didn't. I think in general I got less "family reunion" time and did less catching up with people I already know. This is probably fixable by me being more proactive 5/n

3. I really enjoyed the poster session! I wish there could have been more of it, because I didn't get to see nearly as many posters as I wanted! That's mostly because I got distracted talking to people. It was also partially because the video intros meant I felt like I had to 6/n

come with an intelligent question to ask. Whereas in person I would just walk up and ask for the spiel. I suspect this tradeoff leads to higher quality poster interactions and is worthwhile overall, though! 7/n

4. This is the opposite of what I expected, but I found myself feeling more social anxiety around starting text-based conversations in the randomly-generated serendipitous collisions groups on slack than around dropping into the video chat pub crawl. I have no idea why. 8/n

5. Whereby (the platform used for breakout groups and socialization) is great! I love the way text chat messages and emoji reactions show up overlaid on the person that typed them. Makes it a lot easier to express things like agreement without interrupting convo 9/n

6. (this is actually @amlalejini's observation) Relatedly, the ability to express agreement without interrupting or taking time from other people allowed for a super positive atmosphere! I loved the outpouring of compliments that occurred during the talks. 10/n

7. In general, I think one of the keys is having a community where people are willing to commit and go all in, while also being open to experimenting with creative solutions. The @ISALstudents academic karaoke session is a great microcosm of this phenomenon 11/n

For the uninitiated, academic karaoke is a game where someone improvises a presentation to go with a set of slides they've never seen before. It's hilarious, but like any improv game it's hard to do without reinforcement from the audience that you're actually being funny 12/n

Of course, having a group of 40 people unmute themselves on Zoom and laugh wasn't going to work. So the organizers encouraged everyone to turn their videos on and laugh really exaggeratedly so it would be visible to the presenter (while also typing reactions in chat) 13/n

It felt a little unnatural at first but we all just went with it and it was so much fun! The community brought that same energy to the pub crawl, the actual karaoke session (I hear), the minecraft server, the virtual gaming, the VR chat, and all of the other events. 14/n

That's the crux of why this conference was such a success. The ALife community is built on trying wacky new things! I came away feeling like this shared experience has strengthened this community even more than past conferences. 15/n

And now that I think about it, that makes a lot of sense. A lot of my observations here share a theme of the format facilitating community-level interactions where anyone who wants to can participate. That's good for building a strong, welcoming community. 16/n

All in all, this was a huge success and I'm excited to see how we can build on this in the future! Many thanks and congratulations to all of the organizers! @ALifeConf 17/17