This year was the second iteration of an entirely online conference, Palaeontological Virtual Congress, open to abstract submissions from anyone studying paleontological sciences. A broadly accessible conference as the digital means provides increased access to scientific content. There is flexibility with file format, presenters can be visible on camera augmented by images and slides edited into the video, upload their slides without an overlaying audio, or walk through their slides while providing audio narrative.
Talks can be uploaded as recorded .mp4 and like files by the presenters prior to the conference and then the content is available for two weeks for attendees to view and comment on through the WordPress site. The organizers answered some questions for us on the event:
Who organized this event? The organising committee was formed by 10 people, with 3 professors (Carlos Martínez-Pérez, Evangelos Vlachos and Paolo Citton), 3 post-doc, and 4 pre-doc students. In the first iteration of the congress, it was expected there would be around 100 participants, and the final attendees were near 376. This year there was a total of 161 projects presented and 398 participants from 44 different countries.
Were there any issues with the COVID-19 crisis? This congress was first made having in mind only online mechanics, so the Corona crisis did not change how the congress work. But we have noticed an increase in the media exposure that this congress has achieved, and also, a biggest interaction in the participants during the congress and outside the congress. Specially, the congress has been very active in Twitter and the interactions with the palaeontological community in this social media has increased in this edition.
What do you take away from the congress? What did you especially like, and what would you do differently next time? We created this congress as an opportunity for those palaeontologists that do not have enough resources to go to most (or any) palaeontological congress. For that reason, the members of the organizing committee don’t take anything away from the congress… apart form stress! We are proud of the work we have done these two editions, and we are awfully glad of the way the palaeontological community has welcomed this congress, so we can say that that is our award.
Some of the aspect that we like the most about the congress are the video presentations and the virtual field trips. People can be highly creative when given the opportunity to present their work with the video presentations, and the virtual field trips are a nice way to expose interesting places that would not be known otherwise.
We are still struggling making the interactions between the participants as “natural” as possible. This edition, the comment section for the different works have been very active, and we have seen very interesting debates in some of them. This is a problem if you think that we have participants from all around the globe, and our time zones don’t match; but we are sure that we will be able to overcome this for the next edition.
Will there be a 3rd PalaeoVC? Yes, of course! We want to rest for a bit, so it is most possible that we will have the 3rd edition by 2021, although we still cannot tell for sure about the dates.
This year, there was an Early Career Session to highlight the work of early career paleontologists. Time Scavengers team member, Jen Bauer, was invited to aid in judging the session and as a result the winners selected from this session will be promoted via Time Scavengers Meet the Scientist blog.
Congratulations to Marie, James, and Thomas! Follow the PalaeoVC tag on Time Scavengers to see their posts.
Follow the updates for future PalaeoVC events on their website, Twitter, or Facebook.