Liquid Conferences
At traditional conferences people gather together in a common location. Presentations are made, questions asked, talks are given; there is discussion over coffee and dinner and hopefully a good time is had by all. Unfortunately, this also presents significant logistical challenges. Conference centres have to be booked, accommodation found, and financial support has to be obtained; and despite video and audio recording technology, most of the discourse gets lost.
Liquid conferences aim to provide an alternative in the form of virtual conferences where presentations and discourse take place in a dedicated online environment. Invited authors present papers for discussion from the community. In response to that discourse they may revise or adapt their papers; community members with interesting comments can be invited to expand into full articles; and both discourse and revisions are all archived in perpetuity for future reference.
Key aims:
- Effective online environment for virtual meetings, which do not carry logistical costs and do not require all participants to be in the same place at the same time
- Both conventional peer review and post-publication community feedback
- Moderated, intelligent open discourse to surround each presented paper
- Easy opportunity for spontaneous invitations to present papers
- The resulting collections of articles and associated (or selected) commentary can be turned into books, journal special issues or other forms of publication (the Liquid Conference system in this sense can serve as a shepherding community to help improve articles as found in the PLoP series of conferences).
Documents
- Gloria Origgi and Luc Schneider, Liquid conferences use case
Presentations
- Gloria Origgi, Liquid Conferences Presentation
- Aalam Wassef, Gloria Origgi, Roberto Casati, Judith Simon. Interdisciplines 2.0: A website for organizing interdiscipline conferences.
Working example
Interdisciplines was the inspiration for the basic Liquid Conference model. Interdisciplines 2.0 is currently in development with the aim to present a demo version at the LiquidPub Snow Workshop in Fribourg in early February 2010. Broad aims are:
- Greatly enhanced administrative and moderation functionality for ease of Liquid Conference management and creation
- User account management to assist e.g. author upload/submission of articles, the review process, commentary and so on
- Links to the wider LiquidPub platform for e.g. calculation of reputation measures, dissemination via Liquid Journals, etc.
