The Pivot to Virtual Events & What to Expect For Cyber Science 2020
As Covid-19 continues to force the world into lockdown, businesses , jobs as well as events have been forced to change their ways. Where possible people working from home and where not keeping the recommended distance. We have seen popular conferences such as IBM’s THINK pivot to virtual in recent weeks.
What has changed?
Of course the obvious being the shift to virtual however there are many differences that can be seen in the pivot from physical events to online. Online events are not new, in fact they have been happening since 1993! The first online event being a ‘virtual trade show’ by a company of the time Onstream Media. However, in changing your event from physical to online it’s important for organisation teams to look at the event and think can it perform well digitally? Educational and product focused events adapt well but others can struggle.
There are also major benefits in the decision for events to go online. The opportunity to engage with a larger audience presents itself. Virtual conference services such as Zoom enable users to allow up to 10,000 viewers at once. This gives local conferences a real chance to thrive! As well as this going online reduces our carbon footprint dramatically while also reducing costs.
Engaging the audience
However there is the problem of interactivity with virtual events. With conferences the ability to network with other attendees is a huge factor in people’s choice to attend. Contrary to many beliefs, research shows that 47% of people are more likely to ask a question at a virtual event so there are plenty of opportunities to boost audience engagement.
We recommend putting a face to the voice, solely audio based events can result in attendees tuning out. As well as this, anybody can speak about a topic, but someone who is passionate will be more likely to engage the audience, therefore in hosting your online event it is important to have speakers who are excited and enthusiastic about the topic they are speaking about. Speakers can incorporate interactive features to their session. For example, a live Q&A which allows for engagement between the speaker and the audience members.
With many events being forced to go virtual it is important to make yours stand out from the crowd!
What should you expect from Cyber Science?
Cyber Science 2020 is no different. This year Cyber Science will be going virtual. All registered attendees will now have virtual access to keynotes speakers ,workshops and poster sessions throughout this period. Be sure to check out our recent blog on keynote speaker Paul C Dwyer!
We have also reduced our prices and added some new keynote speakers to our existing impressive line up. Vincent Blake and Dr Siôn Lloyd will also be amongst our selection of keynotes this June! To incorporate elements of interactivity into our conference we will have a live Q&A at the end of each presentation. This gives the audience a chance to ask their questions and understand the speakers insights a little more. For those of you who follow Cyber Science on twitter we will also be live tweeting throughout the event.
For authors wishing to submit a paper to this year’s Cyber Science conference we have also extended submissions to the 10th of May! It should be noted that this applies to the submission of new papers and those that have already been submitted can not be changed.
Although we won’t get the opportunity to host Cyber Science 2020 in Dublin, with our decision to go virtual it was the perfect opportunity to extend our conference to 5 days instead of 3. This will mean that the 4 co-located conferences, Social Media, Cyber Sa, Cyber Intent and Cyber Security will be spread out amongst this period including workshops and poster sessions.