The IA Conference ended its four week run, which as some of you may recall was originally a five day event In New Orleans with 12 preconference workshops and 60 talks in three tracks. The format changed to all prerecorded talks released in three tracks daily over a period of three weeks. We put the plenaries on Mondays and Fridays and special programming, like panel talks and poster sessions, on Wednesdays. We used Slack for daily AMAs and Zoom for weekend watch parties and Q&A sessions with plenaries. Other social and mentoring activities took place mornings, weekends and evenings.
The workshops which usually come first were all moved to the fourth week except for Jorge Arango’s IA Essentials. We had a lot of student scholarship attendees and didn’t want to make them wait until after the main conference.
We have a lot of amazing people to thank for puling it off, starting with dozens of volunteers whose stamina is inspiring. I honestly wasn’t sure we could hold people that long. But Jared Spool thought we could do it and Cheryl at Rosenfeld Media gave us some valuable advice about connecting through online platforms.
So, what did we do? Check out this presentation “Rapid Switch: How we turned a five day onsite event into a monthlong, online celebration,” presented at the 500 Members Celebration of the Digital Collaboration Practitioners.