 All right, I think we should probably get started although I see people are still joining us. Let me welcome you back to the final session of the virtual segment of CNI's December 2021 member meeting. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI and I'm very pleased that you joined us for this session today. I think you will find this very interesting and I hope that we will be able to have some conversation with our presenters after they've taken us through this because I think there's a lot of uncertainty. There are a lot of different points of view around this and yet it's a it's really quite a quite a critical issue for the way knowledge is going to be disseminated and how the culture of scholarship is going to operate in different fields going forward. It's easy to kind of, you know, minimize this issue, but it actually is quite a quite a seriously significant one. It also has implications for things like the health of some of our scholarly societies, particularly financially. Just a couple of quick notes before I turn it over to our presenters. Danielle Cooper will not be joining us today but Laura Brown and Dylan Rudiger will authoritatively cover the issues at hand. Danielle sends her regrets. We've got the this session as we have all the sessions for this virtual meeting in web meeting rather than webinar mode so you can in fact see who's with us by looking at the participants and you should feel free to drop messages to your colleagues and things like that. If you like also please feel free to use the chat for comments or questions as the as the presentation unfolds. When we finish up with the discussion at the end of this invited presentation. I'll say just a few brief words to close our virtual event for 2021. So I will see you on the other side of this and with that, let me welcome Dylan and Laura. Thank you so much for coming to talk about this and thank you also for the excellent report that you've put out, which I'm sure you will have a link to somewhere in your presentation and I have also shared with the CNI announcements prior. So, welcome, and over to you. Thanks a lot Cliff and and greetings everybody. Thanks for coming to this session on coven in the future of scholarly meetings. I'll start out by just introducing us. I'm Laura Brown, until recently I was the managing director of J store, and now I'm a senior advisor at Ithaca where I work across all our services, and on research and special projects. And my colleague, Dylan Riediger is a qualitative analyst at SNR and a former staff member of the American Historical Association. We've had some firsthand experience of what we're going to be talking about. So Dylan and I will be talking today about a new combined Ithaca SNR and J store labs project. This is the first time that this kind of collaboration has happened within our organization to help scholarly societies imagine the future of their academic conferences. The initiative actually grew out of a series of interviews that Roger Schoenfeld and I conducted with societies right in the midst of the pandemic. And the biggest concern we heard during many many concerns was about the effect of the pandemic on their meeting plans. This was the most worrisome issue, and several of the societies asked us if we had useful advice or research we could share with them about this. So this project is the result of that question. And thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we have funding to support the inquiry. We want to be as interactive as possible today. So we plan to make just a short presentation, outlining questions and issues and giving you a little sense of what the scope of the project is. And then we want to leave plenty of time for a substantial open discussion questions, any kind of feedback that you can give us it would be helpful in shaping this too. So, I'm going to turn this over to Dylan now to do our short presentation and then we'll invite questions and discussion at the end. So over to you Dylan. Thanks Laura, thanks for the introduction and the framing remarks. And we're going to try to kind of get in and out quickly today to maximize the opportunities for interaction here we really are in a learning mode and phase of this project and so we're really excited for the opportunity to talk with people who attend and organize conferences and staff that that go to conferences and who are immersed in the issues who can help us as we think through what this project is going to ultimately end up looking like. In terms of some some initial kind of framing remarks. I think I would start by saying that, you know, as of early 2020 the basic model for scholarly conferences reflected what I think it's fair to characterize as kind of aging ideas about what scholarly communication looked like. And as ideas about the composition of scholarly communities that were increasingly at odds with what the actual composition of those communities looked like. And so you had kind of conference models that really were a little bit long in the tooth and had been around for quite some time without a whole lot of change in many fields. And part of the reason for this is that steering a new course for scholarly conferences, especially the kind of big flagship conferences that many scholarly societies hosts is quite a difficult undertaking it involves a lot of complicated financial legal technical issues, and efforts to balance the competing interests of members of scholarly communities that all kind of collectively make it very difficult to radically steer new courses for meetings they have a lot of legacy policies and forms that once kind of they become entrenched are very difficult to disentangle. However, when the when the pandemic broke out, as Laura has already alluded to it was obviously a pretty substantial challenge for many scholarly societies but it also provided a rather unexpected opportunity to shake up a genre that was beset by a number of challenges and kind of growing tensions that we see across a number of different scholarly communities. Before the pandemic started scholar societies were already facing calls from their members to rethink their reliance on in person meeting. And the criticisms of these conferences were coming from a number of different directions. There were environmental concerns about the carbon cost of travel, which was probably the most significant voiced concern again and most often voiced concern among constituencies, particularly in fields in the environmental sciences but also in other fields as well. Where members were really calling upon societies to justify the amount of air travel involved in in person meetings and pointing towards virtual and hybrid models as a potential way to limit the carbon costs of academic gatherings. There were substantial and growing concerns about accessibility and equity issues related to in person gatherings. Some of these were related to issues of disability and ability of school of members of the community, but also a lot of issues related to economic inequalities that were making the meeting increasingly inaccessible or a substantial burden for different kinds of constituencies who met at the at the annual meeting. In particular, perhaps early career and graduate students who were who were attending. There were also, and have been, and I think this trend it's safe to say we'll likely continue fewer and fewer places where it felt safe to meet in person meetings. One example, the state of California has laws prohibiting the use of state funds for travel to a number of states, including places like Florida and Texas that might otherwise be prime meeting locations, but which become really untenable if California employees are unable to spend funds to attend meetings in those locations. And so when you think about the kind of moral and financial considerations that are involved in figuring out where to have an in person the kind of politicization of most aspects of American life or making it increasingly difficult to find places to meet. And finally I would say that in some fields. There's been trends over the last decade or two towards reduced attendance at annual meetings, especially the big national conferences that scholarly societies are often involved in organizing. And so the net, the revenue and the attendance associated with these meetings has been under pressure as well as people are kind of voting with their feet for various reasons about where they were going to spend their conference time and money. So even before cove it came out there were already a lot of kind of concerns percolating and bubbling up to the surface about the viability over the longer term of in person meetings. Despite those tensions prior to cove it relatively few associations had made meaningful moves towards virtual or hybrid meetings. Most of them were still holding most of their gatherings as in person affairs. There had been experimentation with new forms of meetings of course, but much of that was kind of tentative and on the margins, and not very common in a in a genre that was still very much focused on in person. In most fields. I would point to maybe one possible exception that I think is relatively important in this which perhaps especially applies to humanities and social sciences field and that is the decreased commitment that societies had made to the idea that job interviews would be a central activity that took place at their meetings. It was largely forced on societies either because hiring was declining or because zoom and other video formats were increasingly becoming the kind of normal way to conduct first round interviews. But I think if you start to think about places where virtual formats were starting to creep into the activities that we often associate with annual meetings in particular. It's those job interviews where you started to see some of these trends emerging first, and also that has implications for why attendance, for instance, was under pressure in those fields as well. But either way, COVID created a kind of unexpected opportunity, an unwelcome one for many societies to all experiment simultaneously with new possibilities for what an annual meeting or a scholarly conference could look like. And in the now, you know, 20 months or so since COVID has broken out. We've seen collectively a very rich body of experiments being conducted by societies really all over the planet about how to rethink what their conferences should look like going forward. And this research that Cliff alluded to that that if the case and ours conducted earlier this year has suggested that in many respects the the virtual conferences of the past couple of years have worked better than many people might have thought they would have the technological formats have proven viable to have meetings like the kind that we're having today. There's some emerging evidence that at least in some fields, the attendance for virtual conferences has been broader and more diverse than has sometimes been the case for in person meetings. This also, I think, been shown that in that in some instances certain kinds of presentation genres and I would point perhaps to the poster as a really good example of this have kind of been sites of particular experimentation and perhaps invigoration as the kind of recorded format for posters has given the opportunity to talk about their work, not just show it, and perhaps to have it seen by more people. But even though there's been a lot of successes and perhaps some surprising ones. I think it's also fair to say that the challenges remain fairly daunting. Long term financial models for funding virtual and in particular hybrid events are not clear at this moment. There are some models that would support them don't necessarily align very well with the current staff that scholarly societies have the quality of engagement has been, I think it's safe to say uneven at best. It's particularly true of networking activities and the social aspects of conferences the kind of things that go on between panels and at receptions have proven pretty difficult to replicate in online environments. And that means that the kind of, not only the networking functions but the community functions of meetings which is a really important part of what they do have haven't fared as well as perhaps the like scholarly communicative aspects of meetings. And finally there's emerging questions about how and if it's appropriate to kind of monetize the increasingly large body of recorded content that's available as more and more conferences have recorded and archived sessions there's questions that are emerging about who owns the property right to those presentations, how it might be used as a benefit to members how it might be perhaps sold and turned into content and what the implication of thinking about scholarly presentations that were once mostly kind of ephemeral. What happens when you think about them as a kind of permanent archival stream of content that's available for for later use. So there are a lot of questions that are still up in the air and remain to be answered satisfactorily. And these are the kind of things that the future of scholarly meetings project is really designed to address. And as Laura mentioned in her introduction. This is a project that the Sloan Foundation has funded and that if it can SNR and J store labs will be running together. And it's a new kind of experiment for our two units of Ithaca to collaborate in this way. We're going to be convening a cohort of scholarly societies beginning in January of 2022. For a year long project combining research, design thinking, and opportunities to share knowledge and explore together within a cohort environment to try to chart a collective future towards scholarly meetings. And throughout the project we're going to be looking for actionable kind of feasible immediate interventions into the conference space but we'll also be keeping a very close eye on the bigger picture kind of conceptual issues that are in play here. What is the purpose of meeting in the first place. What are we trying to accomplish when we bring scholarly communities together. What kinds of communicative formats are we trying to foster and encourage, and how to shifts in the modality of the way that we meet, create new opportunities to align purpose and format, or to use novel formats to create new kinds of purposes for what scholarship can be and what scholarly communities can look like. The features of this project will be a series of workshops and meetings that will convene representatives from 17 scholarly societies together for sustained exploration and conversation about topics of immediate strategic importance for annual particular but scholarly gatherings in general. Combined with a series of research projects that if the SNR will undertake that are designed to provide data to support data driven decision making about technological options about models that are emerging from either other scholarly conversations or meetings that are taking place in kind of academic academic adjacent spaces or even beyond academia entirely. And so to bring models that can that can make the thinking inside this conversations informed by data. And then finally, JSTOR labs will be bringing to the table their expertise in design thinking and in design informed thinking so that the product of that research and those conversations can then be put through kind of iterative design work that's designed to result in the creation of several prototypes of new innovations in the conference space that grow out of specific concerns that emerge from the cohort. And I think it's this kind of combination of conversation and a community of learners research and iterative design thinking that make this project so interesting and promising. We're excited to announce that just this morning actually, we have publicly announced the list of societies who will be collaborating with us on this work. This is a, you can see some of the logos for the organizations here. They're probably kind of small on zoom. I won't read them all but I will say that they range widely, both in terms of disciplines that are affiliated with the project we have a large number of stem fields but also social science and humanities fields and interdisciplinary fields represented in the cohort. We also have and I think this is quite important and will be really interesting to see how this plays out societies of widely different sizes. The organizations, the American Society of Civil Engineers, for instance, are quite large. Others of them, the Bibliographical Society of America, for instance, or the Oceanography Society are quite small and this makes this as important implications for how they think about the future of meetings. If you have a staff of around 20 like the American Historical Association does, you have many different options that are on the table. Then if you're the American Arachnological Society and you have zero full time equivalent staff and are in fact your conference is organized by volunteers. And so by bringing all these groups together, we'll have both kind of two cohorts of smaller and larger societies that can work with each other, but also will have opportunities for thinking across organizational structures and sizes that should produce really interesting ideas. The project's going to launch in January with an initial series of fact finding activities to gather some initial information about the experiences that the societies have had over the past couple of years. And then we'll convene a series of meetings over the course of 2022. These will all be kind of working workshops. At the centerpiece of these will be the design lab that JSTOR Labs will be running in the summer, which will produce some kind of iterative design work, and a final public report will be published at the end of 2022. And we anticipate that the innovations that the cohort will begin to collectively come up with will start showing up in scholarly conferences and annual meetings as early as 2023. So as I'm, as both Laura and I have mentioned, we're really at the initial phase of this project. We're officially launching it next month. And we're currently in a learning mode. And we took this opportunity and this gracious invitation from Cliff as a chance to really have a conversation with the people who are here today. And to, to gather more information as we approach the beginning of this project, and we knew that we would have here today people who attend conferences who organize them who have staff that they have to think about how to use conferences for professional development purposes. I really wanted to leave as much time as possible for open conversation. So we're going to open things up for the remainder of the session to a conversation with everyone who's here. We have a couple of initial ideas that we wanted to put on the table as possible topics for conversation. And it's meant to be conversation starters more than to dictate what we need to talk about some of the things that we though would be interested to hear is generally about your experience at COVID era conferences and what you think has been successful or less successful. So why not and to what extent and how your thinking has changed around when it's necessary for you or your staff to attend conferences in person and when it's more appropriate to meet in virtual or hybrid formats. So what kind of agenda items you'd like to see on the table as we start planning the workshops that will constitute much of this, much of this project so with that, I'll close my remarks and we'll open up the floor to people who'd like to talk and I'm going to do it. So do we have any questions Laura. I don't think so I think we're just very eager to hear some of the experiences. People have had and, and especially like where, where you all see there's opportunity that we, you know you, you think we should be focusing on I know one thing that came out very strongly in the interview process. Was the question of vendor exhibits and how they had, they had basically been done the same way for decades, and not too much taken advantage of in terms of, you know, what's possible with digital or some kind of a hybrid thing. But if you look at the exhibit, the raise on debt rates, it's bringing together what what the society brings is the community that the organized community of learners and experts into that space. And the vendors want to reach that community with their services and, you know what happens lots of times people are sitting in a hall for a long time, just, you know, talking about vendors talking to each other, and the opportunity to really interact is is limited. And, you know, what kind of reimagination can we do there that would be powerful for all those different stakeholders so those are the kinds of questions we have that I think people are starting to to wonder about, given what they've just been through in the last year and a half. But what we're interested in all those kinds of questions, where their opportunities. So you see we have a couple of questions and comments coming in on the chat. And I think, I think, I think one question is about about the necessity for specialized conference platforms as opposed to a general purpose tool like zoom. I think it would be interesting to hear what you're thinking about that and one of our colleagues had a comment on that scout. Another question that that that's kind of implicit in some of the things that Michael Seidel mentioned in his comment is the is in is international scope. And there's a particular sub piece of that I'd really love to hear you reflect on a little bit. And that's time zones. When you're dealing with something that's mostly in in a couple of adjacent time zones like CNI. Yes, there are a few, there are a few individual outliers but mostly it coheres into a fairly compact set of time zones. And when you get these really international meetings where, you know, in the, in the in person times, everybody sort of made a pact to go away someplace, get on the local time zone for a few days and have the meeting. That seems to really not work in the digital environment. I'm wondering if you're hearing people think that went through it all. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting and important question cliff and it's something that I've been trying to think through I mean, one of the traditional features of in person conferences for better or worse and it cuts both ways is that they've been having multiple gatherings of communities in often kind of liminal spaces people get on a plane and they leave their house and they go somewhere else. And they're together for a concentrated period of time and it creates physical kind of manifestation of a community. It also creates a kind of temporal bubble for people to inhabit a conference in a, in a very kind of totalizing way. The virtual conferences often end up being integrated into life rather than kind of set aside from the rest of life. And so I think that as one of the one of the questions that I think is on the table is like, what's the value of the conference as a liminal and physical space that's kind of separate from a lot of the rest of life. And then what are the disadvantages of that. And also in relation to things like time zones. We're also seeing in a lot of instances, a trend towards lengthening the time of conferences. Some of this is about optimizing time zones that are convenient for as many people as possible. Some of this is about, you know, realizing that if you're not bound by hotel contracts and airplane flights that you can meet for two weeks or three weeks instead of over a long weekend. And as you stretch the kind of, as you play with time and stretch it out, you lose that sense of a conference as a kind of singular event that's happening, and it becomes closer to almost like, you know, you have dreams potentially some kind of like Netflix out there where you can just kind of turn it on anytime and see a conference happening somewhere or another. And so I think, you know, I don't, I don't know what the answers to these things are, but I think as you play around with the temporality of conferences, you gain advantages like not having to have 8am sessions, or being able to think across time zones in new ways. You also have to reckon with what's lost when you're not meeting in a kind of liminal physical space, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think that I just extracting yourself from your regular life to be 100% at a conference makes a huge difference to the success of the conference. On the other hand, the participation that can happen for so many different parts of the organization in a virtual meeting. People were really excited about that and you know getting students involved and you know lowering the cost and all that. I do think that one of the things we heard was that there was more interest in doing regional meetings. And that that, I don't know if you all are finding that, but the idea that they could be less heavy to stage and more focused on the concerns of, you know, that particular region. Or even that, you know, sort of topically focused, but that a more intimate meeting in a, in an online space can sometimes be more successful than a giant presentation mode. Especially, especially when the presentation mode is like the old fashioned, let me get up there and talk as an academic for an, you know, 45 minutes about my paper. And that on zoom, or whatever the medium is, can just, you know, be deadly in a way that the you up the ante on well if you're going to try and entertain people for that period of time. You know, in a, in a, in a medium that people usually they are entertained by that the idea whole idea of a presentation may need to be different. We need to be more highly staged and more thoughtful about audience and all that kind of stuff so I do think that the, the idea of smaller, I think somebody said here that they, they thought the more the smaller meetings were much more effective because they were more informal and actually more interactive. That that may be an opportunity that would be interesting. And when the big conferences happen that there may be like a whole new level that we have to get to, to present something that's worth people sitting there. Laura, there's a question that's come in that that has to do with vendors that I'll just ask you if you want to take a crack at. And it's from it's from Lisa Hinchcliffe, who says that you know one question is about which subpopulations of people are no longer attending virtual meetings. She says that she's heard from vendors that there are more attendees, but they're not the decision makers on purchasing who are coming. And so the overall effect is that, you know the vendors aren't selling as much because the right people aren't there. Has that was that something that came up in the interviews that you and Roger did. No, not so much. I think that what came up more from that was just that, you know, that a lot of vendors, I think would love the opportunity to rethink how to have the right kinds of conversations, what the conversation should look like, how to, you know, how to present things in some way that that entice people. So I do think that's a question of if there are if people aren't attend, you know, quote unquote attending. Time is very fluid in this environment that you can schedule all kinds of different ways to have the conference and so the idea that that's one of the things that has to be rethought is how do you get the decision makers to attend some of the virtual exhibit stuff that doesn't look like walking around virtually into people's booths and seeing what they're doing but something much more dynamic that way. I think that's right for conversation. But we didn't hear we didn't hear that we heard that more people who hadn't been able to go before were able to go, but we hadn't heard that, you know, sort of the leadership had decided not to go or I've talked over the past couple of months with several different vendors, and the issue that I've heard mostly is more about just getting people to come to the virtual exhibit halls is very challenging. The offerings that people are presenting are not getting a lot of views and are not the traffic is just down considerably. And also, I did some exploratory research earlier this year to try to figure out what I could find out about demographics of who was attending annual meetings in 10 or 11 fields. And it was pretty difficult to find out much specific information. This is one of the things that I think we're going to be in a position when we have the cohort together to learn more about because societies do have a pretty good idea who's attending their meetings. They often either don't publish that information or it or it gets published, you know, on a delayed schedule, but by bringing together a group of societies from a bunch of different fields. One of the things we'll be trying to find out together is who's attending the meeting. And, you know what their profile look like there's been for instance some evidence to suggest that graduate students and early career people are more likely to attend virtual meetings, but there isn't a whole lot of hard data to back that up. And this will be something that will be in a position to to understand it with much greater specificity and I would think that Lisa's question about like who's coming is the kind of thing that societies probably know and are not for one reason or another sharing in a public setting. There's a number of comments coming in the chat it's actually so many of them that it's hard to keep track of, I would encourage people if they have something they want to say to just say it. There's no reason that this needs to be the Laura and Dylan show so if you've got a comment that you want to chime in on please, please feel free to turn this into a real discussion. And then that'll also allow us a little time to scroll through the chat. If somebody wants to actually talk. Just go go for it turn your mic on and, or I can do flow can floor control if necessary if there are too many people want to talk at once. Well, I'm happy to say a few words because this is an issue which the iSchools deal with quite actively. We are planning right now for our third virtual conference, and one of the real challenges is something you said the social aspects of it. Dale was talking about that too it's one of the things that we don't always do well in physical conferences. We cover the planets that we have time zones from New Zealand to Pacific in the US and Canada. This is all challenging but it is learnable. We are happy to share our experiences with anyone who is interested. We also use a vendor that allows people to create their own breakout sessions, which I think is a big plus because it allows for conversations. I could go on for much longer but I will stop. Unless of course there's a cap. Well, Scout has a quest, a comment, which I think is just really important, and perhaps. She suggests you might speak to this Michael but I think others others will wait in as well. And that's about mentorship for early career people graduate students. And that's, that's as much a social process as anything else. And, you know, really seems to be in peril in the virtual environment. But it's so important. I will just say a word about this because this is something that has come to our attention to, we have early career and graduate students sessions. One of the things that we're really trying to do is to mix it so that the people in those also get to engage not just at a particular time and with particular set of people, but with more people. In theory, this is possible. The Japanese members especially would like not just to talk to other Japanese but would like to talk to Chinese to people in Europe to people elsewhere in the world. Enabling that all is a technical challenge, but we're working on it. We were learning many things and we need to learn more. The value of early career mentorship is really a subsection of the general question of whether what the quality of engagement is like, and how much of the value of conferences happens outside of the panels. And certainly I mean I'll say for myself that I have not yet seen a platform that has really inspired me to feel particularly engaged in the networks or receptions that I've attended. In fact, I found that those used to be my favorite part of academic conferences and nowadays when I see them on a conference schedule, I usually avoid them at all costs. And I think that's a really tricky thing and I don't. You know, I suspect this is something that our cohort is going to be very preoccupied with, not only because one of the functions of meetings is to kind of replicate scholarly communities to reproduce them over time and to provide by providing mentorship, but also because so much of the value that maybe particular the decision makers that Lisa was talking about earlier, get from coming to these conferences is who they can see. And that's are a decent, you know, sometimes at getting people talking but they're not the same thing as having a cup of coffee around a table, which I think Laura had mentioned this kind of interest in more regional gatherings I think that's one that some societies are starting to think about is kind of what I'm seeing what I've kind of calling like hub and spoke model conferences, where you might have an annual meeting, being organized in conjunction with a series of regional meetings you might have a virtual virtual meeting that's actually happening live at different cities around the country or around the world. So all kinds of questions about how to do this effectively the the many of them seem to. Many of those models are built around the idea of hybrid meetings and hybrid meetings are very tricky to pull off their super expensive to figure out how to make work. I do provide some kind of models for figuring out how to have opportunities for people to be gathering in smaller more concentrated groups that is attractive to a lot of people. So just from what I've heard and we've been following this, most of the people at Ithaca let us know when they go to meetings like what was successful and what wasn't. And there's probably at this point, more that wasn't as successful in the experimentation place. I was saying that particularly was, I think challenging was the idea of trying to match people up beforehand into. You don't know these people and here's your cohort that you can, you know, spend some time in little breakout rooms with and I don't think the breakout rooms worked I think people resented being, you know, match made match made in it. And in yet those are the kinds of things that do happen at meetings when you happen to sit down at a table with five people and you don't know, you know, two of them and a conversation starts and it's just, I don't know how we build that kind of serendipity into relationships just are created in these spaces, but that's got to be part of the challenge if we're going to do more of it online. And maybe it's just because it's smaller you get that in a way that you don't get it and can't get it in a very big meeting. Thanks everyone I just have a quick comments from a different aspect. You mentioned about the difference about the in person conference, you have like a separate conference time days right to focusing on whatever same conference. But right now I guess the big challenges online virtual conference integrated with your daily life and your daily job. So that, however, I, I was thinking about something I might advocate in my local institution for spring is what about if you made it as a virtual conference let's say this week, virtual say I do the same thing like I did before for in person conference just to block my calendar. This is my virtual conference. I'm going to just to focus on this topic. Why again this is as a regular in person conference I still catch my work, like during the break or after a night or something. So again, I was thinking about that aspect. If the society individuals organization, try to kind of building this kind of a new behavior, why you are like for me I still have a tons of a meeting during this week get into my calendar but what if we, we find a way to still isolate ourselves for this topic for me I think is a huge difference is if I do that, I will have my mental space to follow the conference, even including the virtual one or pre recorded the one to build that kind of a scholarly thinking strategic thinking. If I in banded with my daily work and daily life. It's very hard to sometimes if you sit there you're still doing multi tasks to do your work right so just want to offer that. Yeah, that's that's so interesting and somebody. I think somebody said earlier in the chat called it conference hygiene was that what it was. I don't hear but I think same kind of thing yeah conference hygiene. Stephen talked about. I don't think we actually have those habits right now. Most of us. And so we're multitasking, or we'll say, Oh, I don't have time to do this really I'll listen to this offline and you know and then you're in the situation where you're sort of half in and half out. I don't actually bring your, your full self to the conference which, which is not what you're getting most of the time, if you're there in person. Yeah I would, I would just add to that that this is one of the things that a lot of societies and conferences have found advantages into stretching the conference schedule out, which is one way of thinking about allowing you to access it, but also makes it easier to pop in and out of, and to think of it as less of a kind of all encompassing experience. At the other end of the of the spectrum there was a conference this spring the the Peter Palooza conference that met for 24 hours straight and experimented with radically compressing the schedule to try to make more of an event out of it. So Peter, for the kind of the kind of issue you're raising about like how do you make it feel more like a conference, how do you dedicate the space to focusing on it and not on other things. How do you feel of like radically compressing the time so that it's something really feels like a concentrated event might be a potential model for recreating that kind of like all encompassing, but relatively short duration event that people can justify taking all day Friday to go attend, because it's going to be over as opposed to one that's going to go on for three weeks. Zoom fatigue is getting more and more real for all of us so the idea though of being, being able to concentrate for X number of hours a day after you've been on zoom all day anyway and then you're just going into, you know, full zoom mode for the, you know, for the conference. I, I think that's going to get worse and worse for us if we're not careful so so so the idea of breaking up the time or thinking about, you know, way to, to fit more in, in, in how we're going to learn when we're not online when we are online as opposed to when we're surrounded by all kinds of stimuli at a meeting, and, you know, able to look at the other people and able to, you know, everything you do when you're sitting in a, you know, in a session and, and it's, and it's live. So, so I do think a lot of this kind of presentation and timing is going to have to be rethought if, if we're going to be successful. If we're approaching the end of our time. There is an incredibly rich set of comments I've, I've, I've never seen anything quite like this since we started doing virtual meetings I mean, people will want to be sure to save a copy of the chat from this because it's really worth spending some time on. Before we let you go, let me ask a final question or a near final question that calls for some speculation. Do you, do you think that we're going to end up with a relatively uniform set of best practices and approaches for conferences in the, in the post pandemic era. Do you think that there are going to be just like wild disciplinary variations in practice. You know where the engineers do one thing and a biologist do something very different, and the historians do something yet again radically different. I think that's a really interesting question I think it's kind of an open question right now. And my sense is, and that discipline and resources and staffing capability will likely play a significant role in how different kinds of organizations react to these kind of things. And some, some types of some fields have much more in the way of resources than others and that's going to necessarily shape their decision making. But I also think that some of it is going to come down to leadership and vision and willingness to engage in really creative rethinking. The conference is really a pretty venerable genre that hasn't has been very resistant to change over time. And absent determined efforts to see things through I wouldn't be surprised if inertia kind of pulls things back. But I think it will be the case too I mean I don't want to sound too, too much like a burn it all down guy because I think some societies will make smart decisions that they want to go back to something that seemed like it was working pretty well for them. But there were there are a lot of fields that where there was already a lot of dissatisfaction about what was what the conferences looked like whether it was declining attendance, whether it was concerns about carbon costs or equity or, you know, accessibility issues. Those issues are going to survive the pandemic and suggest the need for continued thinking about these things. It's going to be tricky because these are hard steps to ships to steer and I think my hunch is that you'll see a spectrum, but maybe not a super radical spectrum. But I also expect there will be some outliers that will be instructive. Yeah, and my sense is that, as with all things technology is going to play a big part. We don't yet have like the kind of standard platforms that tell us how to put on good hybrid meetings that are cost effective. Not what zoom has done to the way we do meetings now and the kinds of innovations that they've introduced that have changed me or even something like PowerPoint. I mean these these kinds of things tend to homogenize the way we approach these new territories, and in some ways channel the kinds of innovation that happen. And within those technology choices, I think you get a lot of idiosyncratic and an imaginative, you know, uses and processes. So I think we can't count out technology as as as something that's going to be more and more an innovation factor, driving us. And I also think that adjacent industries that are completely dependent on events are going to be doing things that tell us new ways to think about how to present in the academy and how to build community online the community. And we've got to be looking at them that's one of the things that this project is doing is trying to find out where those innovations are happening in adjacent industries. And so I think, even being exposed to that can help change the way we solve problems and an experiment. Well thank you there's a lot. There's a lot in there to think about. I can't resist just as we bring this conversation to a close, putting a big underline under something you said earlier about repurposing and all of the, the fact that we now have records of conferences in a virtual environment in a way we historically didn't in many cases and the implications of that and what happens to those materials. That's something that I've been watching very closely and I know you have to and it's something I expect we're going to come back to in in future CNI conversations, because I think that that's another very significant thread here that we really, it deserves an hour in its own right, at least. But thank you so much, and I really hope that you will keep us posted on what you're learning through this process because it matters a great deal to all of us I think. Thanks for the opportunity Cliff and it's been, we're very excited about this project and we feel like it's kind of green fields to understand. Yep. It's possible so. All right, and as I said, people, people definitely should snag themselves a copy of the of the chat from this because there's a lot of wonderful material. And with that, I think we are just about at time. We've kept Laura and Dylan a little long. But I really didn't have a lot to say to close the meeting other than to thank the team at CNI who have made it run so smoothly. And to thank all of our presenters and not just the presenters that you've seen during the synchronous meeting but also all the presenters who made pre recorded presentations, we those will continue to be available. And there's a ton of really wonderful stuff in there. So I hope that you will continue to to mine that collection of material and share it with your colleagues. I just want to mention that we will be sending out in the next couple of days. Evaluation questionnaire for for this virtual event, we're going to do evaluation separately for the virtual and the, the in person event. Since they, they have different sets of attendees. I hope I will see some of you next week at the in person meeting for those that I'm not going to see or speak with again. I wish you a good holidays and a good new year. And I hope everybody will stay safe and stay in touch. And thank, thank you all for participating and particularly for participating so so eagerly in this last session with all of your comments in the chat. I know they're going to be helpful to Laura and Dylan and honestly they're very helpful to me as well. And with that, I will just say thank you and take care.