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"content": "---\ntitle: \"ACMC2020: tools for organising a virtual conference\"\ndescription: \"A detailed rundown of the tools we used to run ACMC2020 online---YouTube Premiere, Discord, EasyChair, and a lot of ffmpeg.\"\ntags:\n - dev\n---\n\nimport Picture from \"@/components/Picture.astro\";\n\nI've been a bit quiet on this blog for the last few weeks[^weeks] because I've\nbeen organising [ACMC2020](https://acmc2020.com/): the _2020 Australasian\nComputer Music Conference_. From the conference landing page:\n\n> This year's conference theme is **inclusion**. We want to highlight the\n> diverse range of people who contribute to Australia's computer/electronic\n> music culture but may not normally attend an academic conference, including\n> artists and scholars who are young/emerging, from regional/remote areas, who\n> have a disability, who are First Nations People, who have low/no income, who\n> are engaged in community music making, or who simply work outside of academia\n> and mainstream institutions.\n\nWell, the conference is now all done for 2020 (although the videos are still\nfreely available online; check out our\n[keynotes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6muRCIp3Kg&list=PL4_Bp-PE5_5sgaN4pIzrz0KGBn0RXramC)).\nIt's been a lot of hard work, but the ACMC community are _amazing_, so it's been\npretty fun as well. A special shout out to the rest of the ACMC\n[organising committee](https://acmc2020.com/#Organisers) (Charles, Nat, Sia, Kit\n& Alec) for all their hard work---thanks team :) So even though I'm writing this\nblog post, these decisions & reflections are really the result of our combined\nlabour, as well as feedback from the ACMC community during the conference.\n\n[^weeks]:\n well, it's actually pretty common that I'm quiet for a few weeks, so I guess\n it's business as usual\n\n[[toc]]\n\n## Tools for running an online conference in 2020\n\nThis post isn't about the success (or otherwise) of ACMC2020 as an inclusive,\naffirming computer music conference. I care about that a lot, and that post is\nin the works, but this isn't it.\n\nInstead, this post is a list of all the tools that we chose to use to put it all\ntogether, and the rationale behind those decisions. There are lots of people all\naround the world organising virtual conferences right now, so hopefully writing\ndown our experiences is helpful.\n\nAs the hosts of a virtual ACMC, our priorities were:\n\n1. to minimise the risk technical difficulties, \"live\" activities were limited\n to those where they add value (for example all talks were pre-recorded &\n watched on YouTube to avoid the technical issues which come with live\n screen-shared zoom presentations)\n\n2. use synchronous communication modes for discussion and q&a, but with\n persistence: leave participants the option of returning to a discussion later\n (or for leaving a question for a presenter in a different timezone, to be\n answered at a friendlier time for them)\n\n3. where possible, use low-cost (because the ACMC doesn't have a huge budget)\n and open-source tools (so that the things we learn can be built upon by\n others)\n\n4. automate all the things; it probably goes without saying if you know me or\n read my blog, but manual work makes me sad and continuous integration\n pipelines make me happy ☺\n\n:::info[tl;dr]\n\nwe used [EasyChair](https://easychair.org/) for submissions & peer review, a\n[customised version of ICLR's](https://github.com/australasian-computer-music-association/acmc2020)\nwebsite,\n[YouTube premiere](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9080341?hl=en), and\n[Discord](https://discord.com/) for text/voice discussion and q&a\n\n:::\n\n### Conference website\n\nInitially we threw up simple [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) site (hosted using\nGitHub Pages) with the basic conference info & Call for Papers. This was\nsuper-easy and did the job through the initial phase of advertising the\nconference and drumming up submissions.\n\nAround the time we were finalising the accepted papers & conference schedule,\nthe ICLR team [posted on HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23282113) that\nthe tooling for their\n[virtual conference](https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/index.html) was newly\n[available on GitHub](https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf). We decided to use\nit as a starting point for building the ACMC2020 conference website.\n\nThe final version of the ACMC site is still live (and will remain so for a while\nat least) at [https://acmc2020.com/](https://acmc2020.com/), and the\n[source is up on GitHub](https://github.com/australasian-computer-music-association/acmc2020)\nas well.\n\n<Picture file=\"posts/acmc-website-words-sounds-screenshot.webp\" alt=\"ACMC website screenshot\" />\n\n#### Reflections\n\n- in the end I think it looked really great (and we received some\n [nice feedback](https://twitter.com/benswift/status/1280746825637453824) from\n the creators of the template) but it was\n [a lot of work](https://github.com/australasian-computer-music-association/acmc2020/pulse)\n requiring a non-trivial amount of web development experience to get it to that\n point (Charles Martin helped a lot with this)\n\n- a static site which is automatically populated based on data in a CSV or YAML\n file is a good option---it means as long as whatever system you're using to\n organise & schedule the accepted papers can output a `.csv` file you can\n probably make it work with this website template\n\n- if I had my time again, I'm undecided as to whether I'd use the same\n [Mini-Conf](https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf) template as a starting\n point, or just write a new Jekyll plugin which adds similar features (and just\n has a more mature docs/ecosystem for static site building)\n\n### Submissions & peer review\n\nWe used [EasyChair](https://easychair.org/) for conference submissions,\npartially because the small-ish size of the conference meant that we were able\nto sneak in under the limits for their free tier. While the reviewing & final\ndecisions were done through EasyChair, at the end of that process we exported\nall the accepted submissions as a big `.csv` file (which we imported into Google\nDocs---see below).\n\n#### Reflections\n\n- since the [ACMA](https://computermusic.org.au/) has its roots in academia, the\n majority of the audience for this conference are familiar with the whole \"call\n for papers -> peer review -> notification -> conference attendance\" thing,\n however there were certainly people for whom this process was unfamiliar and a\n bit daunting (so we need to provide more guidance for those folks next time)\n\n- EasyChair sucks, but the others\n ([Precision Conference](https://new.precisionconference.com/),\n [CMT](https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/)) suck too, so I wouldn't strongly\n push people one way on the other on this part of the process---as long as your\n choice allows you to export all accepted submissions & their metadata in some\n sort of machine-readable format (e.g. CSV, YAML)\n\n### Scheduling/programming the sessions\n\nEasyChair worked fine for distributing the submissions for peer review &\nselecting the ones we wanted in the conference. It doesn't really have a nice\nstory for how to organise those submissions into a coherent conference program.\n\nTo do this, we used a shared Google Docs spreadsheet. Starting with the CSV\nexport from EasyChair, the ACMC committee added columns about which\npresentations should go in which sessions and in which order. To get this data\ninto the [conference website](#website) we needed to manually \"Download as\n`.csv`\", then copy the file into the `sitedata` folder ready to be picked up by\nthe next build of the conference website.\n\n#### Reflections\n\n- ACMA is lucky that _most_ of our community[^chronodiversity] is based in\n Australia across a relatively small range of timezones---if you're running an\n international conference then you need to think about the chronodiversity of\n your participants when you're scheduling your conference sessions (my\n colleague [Steve Blackburn](https://twitter.com/stevemblackburn) has a\n blogpost in the works about this)\n\n- this step required the most manual work (in particular the manual \"Download as\n `.csv`\" step) which was certainly a hassle in the early stages of the\n scheduling process when things are changing a lot, however the convenience &\n familiarity of a spreadsheet was a net win\n\n- the [website infrastructure](#website) has a place for putting python scripts,\n and\n [we used this a lot](https://github.com/australasian-computer-music-association/acmc2020/blob/master/scripts/process_videos.py)\n to run consistency checks & other helpful analyses (because checking stuff\n with scripts is way more fun than checking it by eye, and _probably_ a\n time-saver...)\n\n[^chronodiversity]:\n actually, we did have some overseas participants, and the async nature of\n the [Discord chat](#discord) meant that people could mention them in their\n questions in the text chat, and they could log in at a later time to provide\n answers---this worked really well on a few occasions\n\n### Video presentations\n\nAll the AV content for the conference was streamed to \"attendees\" on YouTube.\nACMC isn't a traditional academic conference---there are audiovisual computer\nmusic performances alongside more traditional paper presentations---but we put\neverything on YouTube nonetheless.\n\nA couple of the performances were livestreamed, but for the majority of the\nconference program participants were asked to submit a video representing their\nperformance or paper presentation. Then, an\n[elaborate series of ffmpeg scripts](https://github.com/australasian-computer-music-association/acmc2020/blob/master/scripts/process_videos.py)[^ffmpeg]\nconcatenated the videos to produce a single video per session, with consistent\n\"titlecards\" announcing the authors & title of each new video in the session.\n\nEach session video was uploaded to YouTube, and scheduled for \"simultaneous\nviewing\" at the scheduled time using the\n[YouTube Premiere](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9080341?hl=en)\nfeature. After the Premiere, the videos were (still are) left up on the\n[ACMC YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKK95K68yVuok-qWNS4Z6Jw) for\npeople to catch up & watch at their leisure.\n\n\n\n[^ffmpeg]:\n while this worked really nicely in the end, those scripts probably took me\n as much time to get right as the rest of the website stuff combined 😞\n\n#### Reflections\n\n- outsourcing the video delivery to YouTube (who, regardless of what you think\n of their business model, are **really good** at delivering video) saved so\n much stress\n\n- the ability to upload & schedule the video ahead of time but still watch it\n all-together allows for synchronous discussion and q&a amongst attendees\n\n- when the premiere is done, you don't have to \"put the videos online for those\n who missed them\"; they're already there (which is _so much easier_ than having\n to make talk recordings, edit them together, and then upload them somewhere)\n\n- YouTube's analytics are also really good, if you're into that sort of thing,\n and you even get stuff like half-decent automatic subtitling and other\n accessibility wins\n\n- it's hard to know what sort of viewership counts as \"successful\", but the ACMC\n conference videos (in total) are currently at 2.2k views and ~500h watch time\n\n- in terms of wranging the videos pre-upload, [`ffmpeg`](https://ffmpeg.org/) is\n _amazing_ for dealing with all the weird audio/video formats that presenters\n will send you, however until you grok that each `ffmpeg` run is actually\n setting up a graph of audio & video sinks, sources & filters you're doomed to\n copy-paste stuff from StackOverflow and then stare in bewilderment at cryptic\n error messages (trust me... I learned this the hard way 😢)\n- not all presenters[^acmc-presenters] at an academic conference have the skills\n (or the inclination) to create an engaging video of their work, so depending\n on your community you might see the occasional \"monotone drone over text\n slides\" presentation (but you'd get bad presentations at an in-person\n conference as well)\n\n[^acmc-presenters]: actually, all the ACMC presenters were great this year ☺\n\n### Q&A and discussion\n\nACMC2020 went all in on text-based chat using [Discord](https://discord.com/)\n(we created our own ACMC2020 Discord server and sent an invite link to all\nconference participants). YouTube is great for one-way one-to-many broadcasting,\nbut not so great for two-way communication, and especially not many-to-many\ninteraction & discussion. And having all the discussion for the whole conference\n(with the ability to `@mention` participants across sessions) in one place\nhelped with the feeling that this was a single event, rather than just a series\nof disconnected YouTube videos.\n\n<Picture file=\"posts/acmc-discord-screenshot.webp\" alt=\"ACMC Discord channel screenshot\" />\n\n#### Reflections\n\n- live video chat can be great for situations where everyone already knows\n everyone else, but video (and even audio) can be a bit intimidating for\n newcomers to a community, and we wanted to make the q&a as inclusive as\n possible\n\n- we considered Zoom, but it's really a video platform---as a text chat platform\n it's really bad (no persistent discussions, no ability to mention other\n participants, no emoji/reaction gifs, etc.)\n\n- within the ACMC2020 Discord server, we created a separate \"channel\" for each\n conference session, where the live discussion would happen (all presenters\n would hang out in that channel during the session), but this also allowed for\n persistent session-specific questions to be asked and returned to later with\n more thoughtful answers (or to get around timezone differences)\n\n- [Slack](https://slack.com/) would have probably worked similarly well to\n Discord, but we liked the fact that Discord makes it easy to jump into an\n \"audio\" chat---this was particularly useful for the keynote q&a sessions where\n the session chair could collate the questions from the text chat, but the\n speaker could respond using audio rather than having to type out their answers\n\n### Going to the pub after the session\n\nSadly, the ACMC committee never found out a good way of recreating this part of\nthe usual conference experience at an online conference. Some folks who were\ngeographically co-located did get together and watch some of the streams\ntogether, but the recent\n[Melbourne covid19 lockdown](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-07/metropolitan-melbourne-suburbs-back-in-coronavirus-lockdown/12431564)\nmeant that some people couldn't even do that.\n\n#### Reflections\n\n- some aspects of the online conference that I prefer, the ACMC community still\n needs to have some way of getting together in person to solidify the\n relationships which developed over the course of ACMC2020\n",
"createdAt": "2026-05-13T23:14:53.745Z",
"description": "A detailed rundown of the tools we used to run ACMC2020 online---YouTube Premiere, Discord, EasyChair, and a lot of ffmpeg.",
"path": "/blog/2020/07/15/acmc2020-organising-my-first-virtual-conference",
"publishedAt": "2020-07-15T00:00:00.000Z",
"site": "at://did:plc:tevykrhi4kibtsipzci76d76/site.standard.publication/self",
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"textContent": "A detailed rundown of the tools we used to run ACMC2020 online---YouTube Premiere, Discord, EasyChair, and a lot of ffmpeg.",
"title": "ACMC2020: tools for organising a virtual conference"
}