Just finished a week long virtual workshop with people from timezones across the world. We were thinking about how we can improve estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. It was a big success, if I do say so myself. A few thoughts, in case useful, on virtual workshops

Pre workshop materials are very helpful, particularly if you need to get everyone on the same page. We had a literature review and a series of videos covering the relevant topics. This can't be too onerous as people are time poor, but it means you can get straight into the chat

On the subject of which, you don't actually want to spend a huge amount of time online. Its hard work. Especially with multiple timezones. So you need to make the best use of the limited time available.

Key to this, I think, is to have a structured plan for each session. Have aims and objectives for what you want to achieve during each period of time. To help support this and to guide the discussion and keep it focused, we hired professional facilitators.

A potential downside of being so structured is that you lose some of the free ranging general scientific chit chat. So we did have some more open time available. We were also keen to promote the social aspects of a conference/workshop.

We managed the social aspects through a VERY cool platform called Spatial. Its a bit difficult to describe but its basically a virtual room and you have an avatar that you can move around and join conversations. I'm not good at networking but even I found this worked well.

Overall it went very well and gives me hope that a low carbon workshop is possible. I think ultimately an in person event remains the ideal (carbon aside and assuming everyone can afford to come - we had plan to pay people) but virtual is definitely a good option.

There were also many excellent twitter folk involved (I may have missed some here, sorry, I am very tired), so thanks to @jrising @mat_ives @ret_ward @KellyHereid @GernotWagner @richardabetts!