Convening during COVID-19: Lessons learnt from organizing virtual workshops in 2020
This paper provides lessons learned for organizers of virtual academic events, particularly those focused on community building and discussion, which is useful for the academic community adapting to remote formats.
This report details the experiences of organizers of WiML's "Un-Workshop" event at ICML 2020, which was held virtually. The authors share their insights to assist future organizers in hosting successful virtual events.
This report is an account of the authors' experiences as organizers of WiML's "Un-Workshop" event at ICML 2020. Un-workshops focus on participant-driven structured discussions on a pre-selected topic. For clarity, this event was different from the "WiML Workshop", which is usually co-located with NeurIPS. In this manuscript, organizers, share their experiences with the hope that it will help future organizers to host a successful virtual event under similar conditions. Women in Machine Learning (WiML)'s mission is creating connections within a small community of women working in machine learning, in order to encourage mentorship, networking, and interchange of ideas and increase the impact of women in the community.