[Opensym2020] Information about Virtual OpenSym 2020

[Gregorio Robles]

  Hi,

  this is the email I will send participants in a couple of hours (around
19:30 CEST). Please, let me know if you would change anything.

  We have now a Zoom vanity URL (opensym.zoom.us) for the conference... but
now I cannot access my account :(. Let's see I can solve this before
providing zoom meeting URLs.

  For the Steering Committee, finally we are going the business-as-usual
way: Zoom + Slack. We did not feel experienced enough to use the free
software alternatives at this time, and have not found propper support. It
is a real pity, but we would have needed to test it properly to feel
confident with it.

  regards, Gregorio

=====================================

Dear participant,

As OpenSym is approaching, we would like to provide some information about
the logistics as it will be a virtual event. This is a new experience for
all of us, and we will do our best to keep OpenSym as interactive as
possible.

OpenSym will take place on Wednesday 26th and Thursday 27th; you can find
the detailed program on the website https://opensym.org/os2020/program/.
Please keep in mind that the time listed on the website is UTC. Please use
a time converter to find the respective time based on your time zone.

As you will see in the program page, there is a preliminary version of the
proceedings already online. These proceedings will be published by ACM soon.

We have created a YouTube playlist with all the teasers of the papers. The
most liked teaser will receive an award in the social event on Wednesday!
Find it at:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL35_eGzSGQbzWYWZxIg4X7ZBXb3MvgtUZ

Twitter: please, use the #opensym2020 hashtag on Twitter to refer to the
conference.


OpenSym will use two platforms; Zoom and Slack. All presentations will take
place on Zoom. All your questions and social interactions will take place
on Slack. You can join the OpenSym-2020 slack channel by using the
following link: opensym2020.slack.com. After registering, feel free to
introduce yourselves in the #whoami channel.

Sessions: Authors will present their papers live on Zoom. If something goes
wrong, a pre-recording will be played. Each presentation will last 10
minutes and afterwards, 5 more minutes will be dedicated for QA of the
presented paper. There will be some time at the end of the session for
discussion as well. Sessions will be led by Session Chairs, who will be in
charge of managing the Q&A (see below for more on this). Zoom links will be
sent soon.

If you want to test the environment, we will have a small “reception”
tomorrow Tuesday from 12 to 14 UTC. You can join anytime in this timespan,
just to say hi and talk with the organizers. We will send the Zoom link
soon.

Please use your real names when registering to identify yourselves. Also,
we strongly recommend to also attach a photo to your profile; associating a
face to a name encourages online interactions. Please respect your peers,
be inclusive and kind in the communication channels.

We have the pleasure to have Rishab A. Ghosh being our keynote speaker for
OpenSym 2020 on August 26th 16:00 UTC. The keynote speech, as all the other
talks, will be live on Zoom and then QA will follow.

After the keynote, we will have a social event. We will use Mozilla Hubs, a
virtual 3D room. Further instructions, including the URL, will follow (and
be given before and after the keynote talk as well). You only need a web
browser to participate.

QA during OpenSym keynotes/sessions:

To address the challenges posed by the online setting, here is how QA will
work:

During the presentation, you can post your questions on the dedicated Slack
channel - there is one Slack channel per paper. We encourage you to use
emojis (like thumbs-up) to indicate that you also have the same question or
you would like the question to be asked. If your question is not already
listed in the channel, please post your question. After each presentation
concludes, the session chair will ask the questions to the authors of the
paper, starting from the most popular questions that gathered most
reactions.

Having a virtual OpenSym poses challenges, but we strongly believe that we
can have a successful and interactive event!



Best regards,

Gregorio (General Chair of OpenSym 2020, in the name of all the Organizing
Committee)

-- 
Gregorio Robles
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Campus de Fuenlabrada (Madrid), España
gregorio.robles at urjc.es | www.urjc.es | @URJC |
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