ECIR 2020 Workshops: Assessing the Impact of Going Online
This provides insights for conference organizers and participants on managing online events, but it is incremental as it documents a specific case without broader methodological innovations.
The paper tackled the challenge of transitioning the ECIR 2020 Workshops to a fully online format due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reporting on organizational aspects and participant experiences without covering scientific content.
ECIR 2020 https://ecir2020.org/ was one of the many conferences affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Conference Chairs decided to keep the initially planned dates (April 14-17, 2020) and move to a fully online event. In this report, we describe the experience of organizing the ECIR 2020 Workshops in this scenario from two perspectives: the workshop organizers and the workshop participants. We provide a report on the organizational aspect of these events and the consequences for participants. Covering the scientific dimension of each workshop is outside the scope of this article.