Today's tweetorial, 3rd in a series of 3, is about scientific conferences, and how they need to adapt during and after the pandemic.

1. We all go to conferences for many, many reasons. We love to see and learn new science, present our work to get feedback and to facilitate career advancement, increase our scientific network, see friends, and do so in a nice place (and maybe ski a la Keystone conferences..).

2. Conference organizers/societies organize mtgs for many reasons, including to broaden scientific exchange, support/promote a field, encourage new collaborations, career development, and financial viability +/-revenue used for other programs (e.g. grants). No judgement here.

3. Without in person meetings until at least spring/summer 2021, how will we do this? What adaptations do we need for e-meetings now and for in person meetings when they resume?

1. Very few of us will take in a full conference online. Meetings have to either shorten sessions (e.g. a few sessions a day of 1-3 hours), or provide content so it can be watched a la carte before/during the scheduled meeting time (maybe at 1.5 speed like students)

2. I will pick and choose my spots, and generally register for a select set of meetings and from those meetings choose lectures I want to see. if recorded, largely doing them at lunch

3. We need live content. I think panels (career development, science discussion) and Q/A sessions work best and are focused, high impact sessions people love. They do not need to be big, and in fact with <50 people it is easier to allow interaction with the audience

4. The role of a moderator in live content is key. A good moderator can keep tabs of questions coming in on a zoom chat, synthesize them into common/blended questions and actually facilitate a high yield discussion. Many of us will need training/practice.

5. We need venues for networking/career development. Panels are great (we will be doing plenty in different meetings I help with), but we need to be creative and think about ways to "matchmake" and create new 1/1 discussions between early career investigators and senior faculty.

6. For meetings with invited speakers, we need to "flip the script" and focus on speaking slots for junior faculty and for trainees soon to enter the job market.

7. Senior folks do not need to speak, or at best should be the "anchor" tenant to draw a crowd to the session. The talks by trainees/junior folks will likely be better anyway :)

8. Giving talks to a zoom audience takes PRACTICE. There is no audience feedback during the talk, and I find I go about 1.25x faster (and I go super fast normally). A 55 min talk can take 40-45m, a 30m talk could be 20-25m. That is good, and leaves time for questions.

9. The "flip the script" idea of focusing on junior investigators getting more speaking slots now has to be maintained/increased long-term. We cannot go back to the old way of conferences having the same "luminary" senior folks speaking at every meeting. No one needs it.

10. When we get back to traveling in person, I know I plan to travel less (at least 50-70% reduction). That will allow me to keep my sanity, see my family more, spend more time with my lab, reduce CO2 footprint, and to suggest younger speakers instead.

11. I don't know how we will handle live meetings when we go back WRT broadcasting lectures to people not at the meeting. For larger meetings, I think it is a no brainer to distribute content/do a hybrid meeting to increase accessibility.

12. For smaller meetings (Keystone/FASEB and smaller), I worry that if every talk is broadcast the "magic" of a smaller meeting with lots of unpublished (pre preprint), early data will be hard to maintain. We need to think about this.

13. The financial model of meetings is going to change. Many professional societies have their annual meeting as a major revenue source for their activities, including grants, programmatic initiatives.. I don't know how this will change but it will IMHO.

14. That being said, in the fields I live in, especially the clinical/translational fields (much less so basic science), we have way, way, way too many meetings. I think this will change in the post-pandemic world and we will have less meeting redundancy

15. There is a lot of good to come out of a more streamlined meeting schedule, and I hope that some meetings with overlapping content from different organizers/societies will use this as a way to merge and create synergistic meetings (1 + 1 can equal 3).

16. But I worry that there is a downside to meeting streamlining/attrition, especially for young investigators who may depend on meetings in their geographic area or on travel grants to get access to exciting content and leaders in the field. There is a potential risk.

17. We need more self-organized, smaller affinity group meetings. A lot of great examples of this during the pandemic with fields organizing their own talks/speakers. This needs to continue, and we need a set of online talks/conferences to continue post-pandemic.

18. Not going to delve too deep into immigration, but the impact of covid-19 &US immigration policies on meetings is going to be felt for a long, long time. May never go back to the old way of US-based meetings being half attended by non-US based peeps....