I recently spent some time discussing with a Discourse client in the UK how they might run a Virtual Conference using Discourse.
As we discussed what they needed it became apparent how well Discourse can do this, but you need a confident and knowledgeable Discourse team to get all the right features in place.
Here are some of the ideas we came up with, which I thought I would share here, since there actually isn’t any other topic on Virtual Conferences yet (which surprised me actually!)
Visuals
Category Banner Theme Component - to add better visuals to the various sections. (NB you can use CSS to insert background images in the banner rather than a plain colour)
In an established Discourse community, where the conference is not the only thing the Discourse instance exists for, you can advertise the conference with a Global Pinned Topic.
Create an overall Category for the Conference (unless the Discourse instance only exists for the conference, in which case you might use the top level for the overall conference and subcategories for each track)
Presentations
You could use Topic Voting to decide on which presentations should be selected from the presentations submitted as part of a Call for Presentations
Navigating the conference: Make a Pinned Topic with the Conference Programme in the conference Category, and link from each programme item in your Programme list to the Topic in which that presentation will be placed.
Use one Topic per presentation - discussion about each session will follow in the replies after the first post.
YouTube and Vimeo can be embedded in posts, this is a standard feature of Discourse
Polls for use during sessions - we can use as we use Sli.do
Delegates and Participation
Delegates can be given access to the Conference area selectively - ie perhaps if not all members of the Discourse community are attending the conference, or if it is a paid conference with ticketing. (Worth mentioning that the Tickets Plugin is about ‘work tickets’ not the kind of tickets we’re talking about here)
Use Badges extensively, for gamification and rewards for attendees/delegates/sponsors/exhibitors
use Tags to help guide delegates to conference content that is interesting to them
Use Groups and Categories to manage who can see what parts (eg restricting access for exhibitors and attendees)
You could consider adding chat integration, particularly if your community already uses a chat platform. This enables you to link as much of the conference conversation to the Discourse instance as possible.
Sponsors and Exhibitors
Create a Sponsors/Supplier area (perhaps as a Subcategory of the conference category)
Use Avatar flair for Sponsors and Exhibitors with their branding
Sponsors and Exhibitors staff can have accounts - ideally use own names rather than company-name accounts, but can be grouped and titled/biographied to reflect their company affiliatiation, with avatar flair, title, etc
Set up all delegates as a Group on Discourse and Group Owners can Group Private Message the delegates before, during, and after the conference
Hopefully this might be of some use to someone out there, especially given that basically every conference in the world is going to be virtual for at least a few more months!
I’m happy for people to suggest other ideas in the replies, and we could even maybe Wikify this post so that people can add and improve.
Shameless Plug: While I’m here I should say that if you are considering running a virtual conference using Discourse, and need help with any aspect - consider us at thepavilion.io
With a slight twist of title name I find these ideas could be useful for sites that support training from time to time. The site I am from is for Prolog, which is a programming language if you didn’t know, and one of our members does training classes about once a year and these ideas would dovetail nicely with that.
Thanks so much for these suggestions, this is something I am working on for an international education conference (in November) that has made the decision early to run online this year.
I’ve been helping been starting a discourse community for the organization. We felt that having each session as a topic was a great format to provide the session materials and host discussions.
I’m curious to find an examples of conferences that have tried hosting their sessions and interactions in discourse.
Just for completitude, I am doing my own process with discourse as a platform for webinars here.
I am writing a guide for my team within apc.org to be able to host events using discourse not only as a space for getting informed about events, but also to encourage participation in the platform through it.
Hi @nicopace! This is an interesting thought experiment you are doing, and helpful when considering what to do next with 🗓 Discourse Event.
I’ve looked into what you’re trying to do for the Global Legal Empowerment Network where I was community manager until last year. Back then we used a mix of other tools to hold online events and Discourse as the place to invite the community and share info before events and then to report back and follow up afterwards. We used GoToWebinar for handling event registration, reminder emails and follow-up emails, and of course for hosting the actual event.
Discourse functionality has improved quite a bit since even then and I’d love to see it grow to support this use csae even more. There are some other features you can look at. One that I especially like is Discourse Shared Edits. We also recently greatly improved the invite system so it’s easy to invite people to join a Discourse, and give them added privileges instantly, just by creating a link and sharing it.
(I am glad to see APC is thriving as an organization - I’ve known it since the early days when I was running Kabissa (long since retired as an org), and even before that when looking to use Fidonet to connect orgs in Africa, with GreenNet in the UK, and even before THAT with Amnesty International and IGC. )
The text is a thought experiment that would like to put in practice in the upcoming weeks.
The idea behind is is to be able to boost the multiple community spaces created with each other, with conversations prior, during, and post webinar happening within the forum.
There are still some rough edges, like how to organize the questions so there is some logic with the rest of the life of the forum, how RSVP will happen for non-users, how the forum experience doesn’t get on the way of the discussion (mostly for newcomers).
I want to streamline the experience so organizing events for staff (and later for members of the site) is straightforward.
The Shared Edits functionality looks very useful for collective note taking, for documenting a certain part of the body of knowledge… though I should put more thought in seeking usecases as I haven’t tried it before.
APC has been a strong force for internet access and digital rights since the early ages. Nice to see the website of your org still accesible through the wayback machine: The Kabissa Legacy - Kabissa Legacy - Kabissa Legacy
Cool! I can see Discourse being a great addition to APC. Feel free to invite me to your instance if you have one for your community. And feel free to report back here as you figure things out or when you have questions about specific Discourse features or to share ideas about ways to improve Discourse to support your use case.
Whoa thanks for pointing out that https://kabissa.org was not redirecting correctly to https://kabissalegacy.kb2.org. I think I’ve fixed that now. It’s a vanilla discourse site and I add to it from time to time to capture some of my favorite memories. Also using it to help former members who have yet to move their domain names from Kabissa. Almost done with that process…