[TYPES] Guide to best practices for virtual conferences

[Tadeusz Litak]

Dear Benjamin, dear all,

apologies for replying via the mailing list (I obviously chose Types rather than Types-announce) instead of heading 
towards the live Google Doc you mentioned. However, I believe that the importance of the issue I want to raise goes 
beyond the task force report in question, especially given that all meetings, workshops and conferences are rapidly 
transferred into online format.

Namely, the report appears to heavily promote Zoom as a go-to tool for various meeting formats without even mentioning 
in passing, much less discussing in detail growing questions about its darker side, in particular concerning privacy and 
security. By now Zoom has been banned by numerous educational institutions (examples: schools in New York, Berkeley or 
Singapore, but also, e.g., Leiden University) and various other organizations, companies and governments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications#Bans

Given everything that I have read so far, I believe these bans are justified. To stop this backlash, Zoom has announced 
90-day feature freeze focusing solely on privacy and security, but also more or less admitting in passing that in all 
nine years of company's existence, they have never taken those questions seriously (and this is a favourable 
interpretation; I am personally leaning towards a less charitable one). It remains to be seen how independent security 
experts are going to evaluate the outcome of these announced three-month efforts. But as things stand now, especially 
given  the inquiry launched by the  New York State Attorney General, uncritically recommending the tool seems simply 
irresponsible, or at the very least premature.

Inasmuch as I can see briefly scanning through the task force report, it does not answer basic questions in this regard:

  * What is the situation of potential attendees and especially speakers who are unwilling to use Zoom or perhaps even
    in some cases banned from using it?
  * Are conference organizers encouraged to investigate if their potential audience agrees with the use of Zoom (or any
    other specific software chosen for the event)?
  * Is every effort made to ensure that everybody involved---not just the organizers, but also speakers and
    participants--- is aware of security and privacy risks involved and ways of minimizing those risks? Just telling the
    hosts to be on the constant lookout for "Zoombombing", as the report suggests, seems fairly minimalistic to me
    (apart from the fact that if "Zoombombing" is possible at all, then it means that security settings of a given
    meeting are rather lax)
  * Have alternative solutions (proprietary and open-source, free or commercial) been sufficiently investigated and
    evaluated? Are people in the community even aware  of the full spectrum of options?

The last point brings us to another issue. Zoom is not only closed source and proprietary, but its free licence entails 
certain limitations from organizers' point of view, especially the restriction of group meetings to 40 minutes. In 
effect, organizers of any event would either need to purchase a suitable license or insist that their institution 
provides one.

If a license needs to be purchased by the organizers at all, then there are commercial tools which handle poor 
connections no worse or better than Zoom does, providing crisp video and clear voice, but unlike Zoom offer 
unmanipulated in-browser participation, without trying to force full-blown installation of the full desktop client, for 
example. I am still in the process of testing various solutions, but I have had positive experiences with, e.g., EyesOn. 
And there is always Jitsi, which is free and open source; unfortunately, in terms of handling video calls with multiple 
participants over shaky connections, it is not quite up there with the likes of EyesOn. Many educational institutions 
already have licenses for other tried and broadly used software, most likely MS Teams.

There is yet another related, but much broader and more fundamental problem which the task force report does not seem to 
address. Namely, the unfolding disaster should lead to a badly overdue discussion of the future of conference-based 
model of dissemination of results in TCS. It has long been seen as a historical pathology, not only by the vast majority 
of other disciplines, but also by numerous leading researchers, much more accomplished than myself. It has been 
distorting normal refereeing and publication process, encouraging and rewarding publication of "extended abstracts" 
instead of properly vetted and written full papers. There was also obvious criticism regarding carbon footprint and 
especially concerning participation and publication costs, this last issue being intensely discussed on this very 
mailing list. Now, while the carbon footprint is no longer a concern for online events, the issue of "extended 
abstracts" and viability of this entire publication model is not going anywhere. And we have now a whole new bunch of 
problems discussed above (as well as numerous other ones discussed in the task force report), while the usual argument 
about benefits of face-to-face meetings loses most of its force.

Why are we keeping up the whole charade? These days, it is possible to augment journal papers with sets of slides or 
video presentations, if there is a need for that. Grant money and funding that used to go towards either organization of 
conferences or participation in such events these days would be much better spent on converting them into open-access 
journals (and as has been pointed out on this very mailing list, ACM's Gold Open Access does appear overpriced). Ditto 
for the time and energy of everybody involved in the organization of said meetings; and as the task force report 
confirms, they will require no less preparation than flesh-and-blood meetings. Sure, with journal publications there are 
issues regarding turnover, competitiveness, timely feedback; the extended abstract model also has the advantage of 
enforcing conciseness. But I do not think that these issues cannot be overcome when converting at least some of existing 
conference series into online journals, preferably open access. Efforts in this direction seem more worthwhile to me 
than trying keep everything going in the form of Zoom webinars.

There is also the potential of coming up with new publication models. My long-standing pet peeve, for example, has been 
the question why most proof assistants do not have anything remotely comparable to Isabelle's Archive of Formal Proofs.

If we, however, do insist on making online conferences the basic dissemination model, I think that questions from the 
first part of my overlong email should be addressed.

Kind regards,

t.


On 13.04.20 14:28, Benjamin C. Pierce wrote:
> [ The Types Forum (announcements only),
>       http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-announce ]
>
>
> *[TL;DR: Please help circulate a new guide for organizers of virtual conferences.]*
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> The Association for Computing Machinery recently chartered a Presidential Task Force to gather and disseminate 
> guidance on best practices for virtual conferences, aimed at the many conference organizers moving their events online 
> right now.
>
> The task force report, *Virtual Conferences: A Guide to Best Practices <https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences>, *is 
> now available on the ACM web site <https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences>  It offers a comprehensive survey of 
> issues, organizational strategies, and technology platforms for successful virtual meetings.
>
> We hope that you and others in your field will find this report useful. If you do, we would love to hear about it! And 
> naturally if you have any suggestions for improvement, we would love to hear those too; the PDF document linked above 
> includes a pointer to a live Google Doc where you can leave suggestions and comments if you like. If you have recently 
> organized a virtual conference or are organizing one now, we would especially like to include your experiences (how 
> you organized it, how it went, what people thought, a summary of any post-conference survey results, your advice for 
> future conferences, etc.) and add it (or better yet a pointer to it) to the appendix that we’ve provided for such 
> experience reports.
>
> Finally, can you please help us make sure this guide reaches the people that need it by forwarding this announcement 
> within your networks (especially, of course, to current conference organizers)?
>
> Many thanks!
>
>      Benjamin Pierce
>
> …on behalf of the entire task force:
>
> Crista Videira Lopes <https://www.ics.uci.edu/~lopes/>, University of California, Irvine, USA (Task Force Co-chair)
> Jeanna Matthews <https://people.clarkson.edu/~jmatthew/>, Clarkson University, USA (Task Force Co-chair, member of ACM 
> Council, Former SGB Chair)
> Benjamin Pierce <https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/>, University of Pennsylvania, USA (Task Force Executive Editor, 
> SIGPLAN Vice Chair, chair of SIGPLAN ad hoc committee on climate change <https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Climate/>)
>
> Blair MacIntyre <https://blairmacintyre.me/>, Georgia Tech, USA (Chaired IEEE VR 2020)
> Gary Olson <https://garymolson.com/>, University of California, Irvine, USA (Former SIGCHI Treasurer; Chair of CSCW 
> Steering Committee, chaired CHI, CSCW, DIS, and many non-ACM conferences)
> Rob Lindeman <https://researchprofile.canterbury.ac.nz/Researcher.aspx?researcherid=4447467>, University of 
> Canterbury, NZ (Chaired IEEE VR 2010)
> Francois Guimbretiere <https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~francois/>, Cornell University, USA (Chaired UIST 2019)
> Srinivasan Keshav <https://www.fitz.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-srinivasan-keshav>, University of Cambridge, UK (Former 
> SIGCOMM Chair)
>
> Ex-officio members:
> Vicki Hanson <https://vickihanson.org/>(ACM CEO, Former ACM President)
> Pat Ryan (ACM COO)
> Donna Cappo (ACM Director of SIG Services)
>