Holding a Conference Online and Live due to COVID-19

Abstract: The joint EDBT/ICDT conference (International Conference on Extending Database Technology/International Conference on Database Theory) is a well established conference series on data management, with annual meetings in the second half of March that attract 250 to 300 delegates. Three weeks before EDBT/ICDT 2020 was planned to take place in Copenhagen, the rapidly developing Covid-19 pandemic led to the decision to cancel the face-to-face event. In the interest of the research community, it was decided to move the conference online while trying to preserve as much of the real-life experience as possible. As far as we know, we are one of the first conferences that moved to a fully synchronous online experience due to the COVID-19 outbreak. With fully synchronous, we mean that participants jointly listened to presentations, had live Q&A, and attended other live events associated with the conference. In this report, we share our decisions, experiences, and lessons learned.