Association for Computing Machinery Guide to Virtual Conferences

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has published a best practices guide on virtual conferences:

"This document is a practical guide to the brave new world of virtual scientific conferences, assembled and curated by members of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Presidential Task Force on What Conferences Can Do to Replace Face-to-Face Meetings."

"With so many conferences going online in a short time, there are many organizers with urgent questions; at the same time, new insights, ideas, and experiences are being generated at a furious rate. We hope that this guide will serve both as a basic orientation for newcomers and as a repository of accumulated knowledge from the community."

"As heavy users of online technologies and as researchers responsible for developing them, the ACM community is especially well-positioned to offer advice that we hope will be helpful to other groups dealing with the same problems."

There are sections on:

• High-Level Planning 
• Technology (hardware, internet connectivity, audio/visual support, and specific communication platforms; it includes a large table comparing available platforms)
• Nuts and Bolts (specific issues related to the different parts of a conference  - plenary and paper sessions, workshops, etc. plus concrete 'bootstrap suggestions' for how to put on conferences of various sizes)
• Fostering Social Interactions discusses what virtual conferences can do to replace the informal, unstructured interactions that are the lifeblood of physical conferences.
• Other Resources contains a list of links to interesting documents related to moving events online.