And... sometimes I still do web coding if needed...

This one was a bear, but National Shellfisheries Association is a group I am fond of, and their executive director is my mentor and Ph.D. advisor, so... how to say no? Especially when they are a consistent client for other things. Of course, I usually help run the in-person conferences because I speak science, A/V, IT, etc., but this year, the meeting (after being canceled for COVID last year) was virtual. At first, they were thinking of doing it all via Zoom. Except... we run a 4-5 day conference with 4-5 concurrent sessions each day. The only thing that isn't concurrent is the Plenary and Happy Hour sessions. Imagine getting over 300 oral presenters (scientists & grad students mostly) from around the world to log into Zoom at the proper time, from 5 continents, 30 countries, at least 15 time zones... and to not go over their allotted time...

Yeah...

That takes "herding cats" to a whole new level.

Then the further 125 poster presenters and doing that all through Zoom only. With over 700 paid attendees watching when it all goes to you know where...

I suggested we use a hybrid approach - all oral presentations submitted as video - (PowerPoint export as MP4, Zoom record locally, full-on video production using DaVinci or Final Cut, whatever). I would check them all for essential quality, optimize them and then turn them into HLS video streams embedded in a web page. The special events such as daily Plenaries, workshops, panels, and Q& A period for each session, along with happy hour each day, would be through Zoom, and all those scheduled to be easily watchable by the largest segment of our attendees (ended up they were all scheduled to happen between 1pm to 5pm EDT.) Posters were available as embedded pdfs on the website, then "Poster Sessions" via Zoom for people to discuss the posters in breakout rooms by topic.

Of course, that meant a website and going through all those videos. Fortunately, everything worked, and the QA/QC on the videos (so much normalizing, buzz and hum removal, dialogue isolation, etc... over half the submitted videos required me to do audio massaging to make them good quality). Fortunately, IT ALL WORKED! Six hundred twenty-seven pages total, no database... next time - go with a database and template-driven backend. Currently slowly building up the NSA system for abstract submissions etc., so we will have a solid database I can, if necessary, use to generate the website next time. This time around, with no existing database, it would have taken as long to build the database and then the website as it did to do the website by hand.

I also added a Discord server and contracted my son to set up channels that matched the session and poster "room" topics to facilitate broader and non-time-limited discussion and socializing (in social chat channels). I went with Discord rather than Slack because it could be used in a web browser and an app and is accessible from most parts of the world. The adoption of Discord was relatively high, with over 400 attendees creating accounts and MANY in-depth discussions taking place.

Overall it was a success. But I will admit I am glad it is done, and I can't wait to be at the next edition, in person, in San Diego, even though I will be both presenting a workshop and a seminar and working on organizing and running it.