Here are some examples:

• They give a voice to more people, not just based on geography, but also for those less socially assertive.
• They produce better permanent resources, via pre-recorded talks, recorded moderated discussions and text based discussions, which can all survive in a searchable format forever.
• They are much more flexible. Topics and people involved can be decided upon on very short notice and still go very well – you can’t fly someone in to an in-person venue on 15 minutes notice.
• It is easier to “catch up” on missed talks and discussions, and thus to stay in the loop for future discussions.

You should, we won’t mind! We are certain your event will be better for it. And let us know too.

However, why take all the time to do it yourself? Don’t you already have papers to write, students to supervise, grants to apply for and tenure to worry about? Even if you can spend weeks of your life carefully preparing your own great online event, why waste that time when we can do it for you?

We know how to implement these principles. We know what can go wrong. We know the whole process from deciding to run an event through to releasing conference proceedings at the end. We will work with you to shape the event how you want it shaped.

Funding the event is possible either directly from a grant, or via charging a very small admission fee of participants (and the fee can be waived for anyone who truly cannot pay).

We have ideas we are very excited about for online-first hybrid conferences, new ways to discover relevant discussion from past events and papers, and completely new in-person conference formats, without any time spent passively listening to people talking about slides.

And one day we’ll make a dent in “the paper”, but for now that mountain is still ahead of us.

Feel free to get in touch if you want to brainstorm ideas!

You can if you want, but we won’t. It concedes defeat right from the start. Online and in-person conferences are necessarily different, but one is not inherently superior to the other.

Using the phrase “virtual conference” is implying it is not-quite a full conference, only virtually one. Online conferences are conferences, not nearly-conferences.

Using the phrase “real world” is implying that the alternative is less real. The online world is also real, and insights generated and shared online are just as real as those in-person.

Cosmology from Home’s story
Cosmology from Home started in 2020 and grew out of the question: “There are so many powerful online communication tools, how can we use them to have a fun and valuable online conference?”

Before any event planning began, we sat and talked and brainstormed for weeks trying to answer this question from the ground up. We didn’t want to take anything from in-person events unless it would work in an online setting. We also didn’t want to neglect doing something innovative online just because “it wouldn’t work” in an in-person setting.

The event that grew out of that is different to most other conferences, and it works. It has now been running every year since 2020 and the community keeps coming back.

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Cosmology Talks’ story
Cosmology talks grew out of the question: “How can we present our research in a more engaging way than the typical academic talk?”

When we sat down to think this over we realised that we would regularly struggle to maintain attention in an academic talk, even if it was just 30 minutes long, but we could happily remain attentive to a podcast for much longer, sometimes even for hours.

There are quite a few reasons for this.

• The discussion format breaks the monotony of one person speaking.
• The interviewing non-expert can ask questions that the expert doesn’t even realise need asked, thus the listener doesn’t get lost early in the recording.
• And, by participating in a discussion, the expert themselves remains engaged the whole way through the recording. They have an avid listener giving them social cues that they are interested. Therefore their whole demeanour remains more interesting to pay attention to.

So, we decided, why not try this format for a technical academic research talk, and Cosmology Talks was born. A year or so later we realised we missed the follow up discussion, and so the Miniworkshops were born.