2020 Virtual RDKit UGM

TL;DR: we had the UGM last week, it was great!

Last week we held the 9th annual RDKit UGM. The plan was to hold the event in Berlin, but thanks to covid19 we did a virtual event instead. After doing a bunch of reading and talking to numerous people, we decided to use a combination of Zoom to handle the video component and Discord to provide interaction.

We had the usual full program of talks covering diverse topics, lightning/poster talks, and even a panel discussion. As usual, the program and PDFs of the presentations that have been shared are in github: https://github.com/rdkit/UGM_2020

We did record the sessions and are investigating ways to effectively make those recordings available.

Some numbers about the event, since everyone loves numbers:

>550 registrations; ~300 unique attendees; ~200 people attending each presentation; >3000 messages in discord; 240 pre-UGM attendee survey responses, 161 of them from first time attendees; 24 poster/lightning presentations, 16 standard talks, 1 panel.

Here's the breakdown of the attendees (based on those pre-UGM survey responses):

and how they're using the RDKit:

One interesting, and completely spontaneous thing that happened, is that people in the Discord channel started curating lists of interesting resources. Those are in the github repo: https://github.com/rdkit/UGM_2020/blob/master/info/curated_list_of_resources.md

I wasn't sure how a community-centered event like the RDKit UGM would work in a virtual format, but it went much, much better than I expected. I think the combination of Zoom for presentations and discord for interaction worked really well, and the feedback from the attendees that we've gotten so far seems to agree. We actually ended up having a lot of interaction among attendees and high-quality discussions of the presentations despite (or perhaps because of... see below) the electronic format.

I wrote up a little blurb with some more details about using Discord for the meeting, which I've enclosed below in case anyone's interested.

In the end though, the UGM is an event that is about people and the community, and the RDKit community is just awesome (yeah, I'm biased, but other people keep saying it too!), so of course the event worked well. :-)

Many thanks are owed to my co-organizers Floriane and Okko, Jaime for helping us use Discord better and for providing live tech support, and Christiane from KNIME who made sure that the Zoom stuff all went well.

And, of course, thanks to the presenters and everyone else who attended and helped make the UGM such a success!

I can't wait until next year!

Some notes about using Discord

Discord takes some getting used to and is clearly not perfect, but I think it worked pretty well. 

Pros:

- Because it's at least somewhat asynchronous it provides an opportunity for people who like to carefully formulate questions and responses to participate in discussions.

- Essentially zero barrier for people to start using it.

- The contents of the discussions are easily available after the event and can be exported and archived.

- Super easy to create new channels to help focus discussions

Cons:

- It can be quite hard to follow a discussion, particularly if it's quite active. I imagine that this is going to be even more true for anyone who comes back in a week and tries to follow a conversation. I think threading systems (like email, slack, forums software like discourse, etc.) can help with this, but I know they drive some people crazy. Having a "Discord best practices" video/document to point to would be really helpful.

- It's not always clear where (which channel) a particular discussion should be taking place, and people make mistakes here. This isn't a big deal live, but there are some conversations that I want to follow up on and *finding* them in discord requires a bunch of searching. I don't think this is actually a perfectly solvable problem

- Discord came out of the gaming community, so it's really informal. This was (I think) fine for the RDKit UGM, where the volunteer nature of the event and the informality is an important part of the culture. But I could imagine it being more problematic for events which are striving for a professional and/or "branded" feel.

The quantity and quality of the "discussions" about the presentations that happened in discord was, overall, better than what happens in person (and I'm taking into account the challenges that discord poses in that assessment). In a traditional live event there's usually a pretty limited time available for Q&A/discussion immediately following a presentation, but with the chat-based system we had some discussions go on for hours. It's also nice that these discussions are publicly visible and can be read/followed by other attendees asynchronously, when they have time. At in-person events you can have great discussions about the presentations during breaks, lunches, etc., but these are typically within very small groups - the three people who get a chance to talk directly to the speaker have a great experience, but the rest of the attendees don't learn a thing.

After the fact it's great to know that I can go back to discord and re-read the discussion, get the URLs that were shared, etc. I don't need to worry about taking notes immediately afterwards each discussion or forgetting important details of what we talked about (I guess this doesn't happen to everyone, but it's a regular "feature" of conferences for me).