Filed in: Virtual & Hybrid Event Case Studies Tag: Case Studies
Read about ECCE 2020’s journey to going virtual.
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About ECCE
The 12th Annual IEEE Energy Conversion Congress & Exposition (ECCE 2020) was originally planned to be held in Detroit, US, October 11 – 15, 2020. ECCE is the IEEE flagship conference on energy conversion systems and technologies. It is sponsored by the IEEE Industry Application Society (IAS) and IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS).
With health and safety being the priority, ECCE was converted to a fully virtual conference. The ECCE 2020 virtual program included video-on-demand presentations (accessible from Oct 9 to Nov 16) as well as live presentations and discussions (during Oct 11-15). We also had virtual exhibitions to showcase the most recent technologies, products, and solutions. ECCE2020 virtual included four plenary presentations from distinguished leaders in energy conversion. Our technical program had 62 oral sessions and 36 digital poster sessions, from a total of 959 technical papers. All these sessions included on-demand videos and live “meet the authors” sessions. There were 20 special sessions, all live or simu-live throughout the week. We had 14 tutorials with on-demand videos and live “meet the instructors” sessions. ECCE2020 also included women in engineering (WIE) sessions, student activities, and PELS&IAS societies award sessions.
Pivoting to Virtual
Under very dynamic situations since the beginning of 2020, it was critical to deal with contingencies through preparing in advance and timely communications.
The ECCE2020 organizing committee closely monitored the COVID-19 pandemic since early 2020. The digest submission (deadline in January 2020) and digest review followed a similar process as in previous years. In March 2020, the organizing committee made a decision that the traditional in-person Technical Program Committee (TPC) meeting to make final paper decisions would be replaced by two virtual TPC meetings. We also planned for necessary program changes such as a reduced number of oral sessions and a reduced number of in-person attendees without knowing what the situation would be like in October.
By May 2020 the organizing committee made the decision that ECCE2020 would be a hybrid format to accommodate both remote and in-person attendees. We sent out a survey to ECCE participants, and the feedback showed that 50% of participants preferred to have the virtual option and 60% of participants considered a reduced virtual option fee (40% lower than in-person fees) to be acceptable. In June, we recommended all authors register for the virtual option before the July final paper submission deadline. The virtual option could be converted to an in-person option at a later time if the situation improved. All necessary instructions and FAQs for attendees and sponsors were updated in a timely fashion. Anticipating a low number of in-person attendees, we started to work with the convention center and hotels to reduce/remove the food and beverage and hotel room attritions.
By July 2020, Detroit still has an in-door gathering limit of 10 persons, and the phase-5 reopening in Michigan did not happen as scheduled. The organizing committee sent the force majeure request of onsite events to IEEE legal who promptly negotiated with Detroit local convention center and hotels. Within a week, we got out of the contracts with no penalties. All previously prepared communication messages for attendees, authors, speakers and sponsorship policies as well as updated conference budget are reviewed by IEEE, and at the same time we obtain approval from the sponsoring societies to converter to fully virtual. Official announcement regarding fully virtual ECCE was sent out on Aug 10.
Challenges
There are many changes from the planning of an in-person conference to a hybrid format and finally to the fully virtual conference. ECCE is a large event with typically over 1500 attendees in recently years, and designing a virtual conference program at this scale is challenging. This year, the ECCE TPC has made significant efforts to completely redesign the traditional ECCE technical program to ensure a pleasant virtual conference experience for everyone.
ECCE has many international attendees. We received over 1600 digests in January from over 70 countries. It was important to design the program schedule to suit the international participants from different time zones. We tried to put all the live sessions in the early morning of North America, which was also a convenient time for participants in most other continents. Considering the economic situation in both industry and academia, we decided to make the plenary session and some special sessions free for everyone.
There are typically many students at ECCE, so we included many student activities in the ECCE virtual event, such as Young Professional (YP) events, student project competitions, and mentorship round tables. We also organized WIE special sessions, worked with sponsoring societies, and organized WIE talks during the ECCE live week.
With so many changes, the ECCE2020 organizing committee had to be creative and invent many new things to address the needs of virtual conference design, communicate with authors/speakers, and create guidelines/instructions.
Partnering with MCE
The ECCE organizing committee started initial communication with MCE in May 2020, shortly after we confirmed the virtual option of ECCE. Then in July, we obtained final confirmation from MCE that they would support the ECCE virtual option. Weekly meetings with the MCE team started in August. Working with the ECCE organizing committee, MCE provided a timeline of video upload, video management, publication, and sponsor session materials collection, which provided a very helpful base timeline that we adopted for the virtual conference preparation.
MCE adopted the ON24 platform to host all the pre-recorded videos. The platform also supported limited live sessions. For ECCE, the opening and plenary sessions were live on ON24. All other technical sessions had pre-recorded videos as on-demand. For all technical sessions, we created “meet the speakers” live sessions using ZOOM, which was managed by ECCE volunteers.
Learning that the current ON24 license with MCE could only host session-level materials such as videos and other resources, we worked with another vendor (iPlantIt/Swoogo) to design and implement the program landing page. The ECCE registration system, the program landing site, and the ON24 sessions all needed to have the registration list. Our vendors worked closely to create automatic integration of registration lists across the platforms, which saved a significant amount of time for manual management.
The MCE team scheduled a training session for ECCE session chairs to guide our volunteers to check the uploaded videos and arrange the videos in each session in the right sequence. They provided instruction videos for speakers on how to upload the videos in different sessions too. For the opening and plenary session, MCE conducted dry runs with all speakers in advance.
To facilitate the video check and management, ECCE2020 volunteers created online video management dashboards to monitor the status of conference video submission, which also worked as an effective communication platform among session chairs, TPC, and the MCE team. All these were done on a very tight schedule.
Successes
Participants’ positive experience of ECCE2020 virtual was our biggest success. We received a great deal of good feedback and comments regarding how the conference program was designed and the ease of using the virtual platform. There were around 1000 paid registrations and 1500 total registrations including the free sessions.
The ECCE organizing committee, particularly the virtual platform chair and webmaster chairs worked very hard together with the vendors to design an easy-to-use platform interface. The ECCE volunteers independently designed and managed around 150 ZOOM-based live sessions for tutorials, technical and special sessions, which all ran extremely well. Significant efforts in communication with participants through different channels ensured that all were aware of key deadlines for various items needed for the virtual conference.
There were 959 accepted papers in the technical program, and we received 958 pre-recorded videos, missing only one. The TPC chairs and session chairs managed the videos in a very short time window as we pushed the video submission deadline to be as late as possible to accommodate the speakers and make the virtual platform landing date as early as possible so people could start watching the videos. With a total of over 1000 videos, this was not possible without the fantastic volunteers as well as timely support from the MCE team during the critical weeks before we launched the virtual platform on October 9th.
Finally, with the hard work from the publicity chairs, the ECCE conference proceedings were submitted to IEEE on October 21 and published on October 30, probably a record time in ECCE history.
Lessons Learned
Like many other conferences this year, we had service agreements with vendors for an in-person conference at the beginning. Many of them have to be updated when we transferred to a hybrid format and finally a virtual conference. Some service negotiations can be stressful especially during the critical period that we had to implement the change in a short time. But both sides worked in good faith, understanding the challenges, and with great assistance from the PELS and IAS staff, we are able to complete those without affecting much of our planning. After what happened in 2020, many conference organizers will be more prepared from the beginning, and many vendors already have the experience for virtual conference services, so this will be less of a challenge in the future.
During the critical time of conference format change, ECCE2020 volunteers really did most of the heavy lifting to ensure a smooth transition. Many committees had much more work to do compared to an in-person event. For example, TPC chairs completed the paper review and in-person program design but then had to re-design the technical sessions to suit a virtual conference, while continuing to work with authors regarding pre-recorded videos and work with session chairs to check and manage videos. We also created a new committee – virtual platform coordination, and the committee chair played a key role in the platform design/testing, instruction preparation, and training sessions for ECCE participants.
Live sessions are important for a virtual conference to provide interactions among speakers and attendees. Scheduling the live session, balancing the needs of participant’s flexibility, and reliability of the live session are all factors that we considered in the planning phase. For a conference at this scale, we decided to offer a short live session to accompany each paper session and tutorial session (on-demand videos) in the early morning. We organized 20 special sessions as live or simu-live to give more flavor to live events and interactions. We recruited a good number of reliable volunteers to serve as live session administrators, technical support, and backup session chairs, to ensure that the meeting started and ended on-time and flowed smoothly.
Advice to Fellow Organizers
Be proactive and be prepared for changes. You should include many contingency plans in your conference planning. Brainstorm on “what if this does not work?” and make sure there is a Plan-B. Also, note that major decisions and communications regarding conference format have to be approved at a higher level by the technical society and IEEE. But the organizing committee has to be prepared in advance and be clear on what needs to be done to avoid unnecessary delays. For example, different budget scenarios, updated timelines, plans to handle main contracts, etc., need to be considered before approval can be obtained.
Communications: This is a critical task especially when a conference has so many changes. For us, before we implemented a change, we usually followed the steps of 1) prepare the communication message, 2) obtain approval from IEEE (mandatory for COVID-19 related messages), 3) update the website and 4) email participants so they can access additional information from the website.
Confirm your virtual platform early to design the user interface and prepare instructions, text, and videos. Prepare with training sessions and dry runs on the virtual platform.
During the conference week, we sent daily emails to all registered participants to summarize the day’s events, promote the next day’s sessions, and promptly address any questions regarding the virtual platform. We also prepared messages and contingency plans in case the virtual platform had problems during the live week, and fortunately, they were not used.
Conference program: We designed a program that had many live sessions to ensure the interaction of all speakers with attendees and scheduled those sessions to be suitable for attendees from different continents. We also left sufficient time for watching on-demand videos on the participants’ own time. Lots of people were working from home, so many could not fully be dedicated to a conference for an entire week. We also tried to put more papers into each session compared to the in-person program, so there were fewer sessions in the program, making it easier to navigate.
Conference materials: With the digital PDF program book, it was easy to implement links from the high-level schedule to the session details. We also designed the book with a single column and large font size for easy viewing using a computer/phone. Obviously, the conference proceedings could be downloaded from the virtual platform, which can also be considered for future in-person conferences to avoid the need for printing materials and USB sticks.
Reliable volunteers: Reliable volunteers are the key to a successful conference. The ECCE2020 organizing committee worked extremely hard to put everything together. We also recruited many volunteers for software administration, technical support, and backup session chairs, to ensure all sessions ran very smoothly. I would like to thank all the members of the ECCE 2020 Organizing Committee as well as all the volunteers for their significant contributions.
Finally, digest submission (January 15, 2021) is just around the corner for ECCE2021, which most likely will be a hybrid event. I am sure the ECCE2021 committee is excited to continue the success and make it an enjoyable experience for all participants both in-person or online.