Thank you!!

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our 2020 MacPFD conference needed to pivot and become a virtual one.We were so excited to run this conference with the help of our speakers/workshop leaders and staff from the new McMaster Continuing Professional Development office to make this a great success.

What did we do?

Our conference was mainly based out of this page below (with embedded Zoom links - now disabled), and each link was password protected to prevent unwanted invasion from uninvited guests (a.k.a. "Zoom bombing").

1. Synchronous video-conferencing interactions with our speakers via Zoom (we had 5 unique zooms, one for the keynote & the reception area and one for each of our parallel tracks);

2. Asynchronous chat-based interactions with our speakers via Slack before/during/after our conference.

Those who registered for the event received full instructions about one week before the event, and the event listing was posted on this website well in advance so that participants could explore the types of workshops and speakers that we would be holding during our workshop-based virtual event. Prior to attending, all the participants were instructed by email (upon registration) to download and install both the Zoom and Slack apps in preparation for the event.

Lessons Learned from our Virtual Conference:

• Reception Zoom - The live RECEPTION Zoom was an innovation we featured so that participants could have a synchronous venue to meet and network with others. Read more about our reception area here. To make this happen, we had a member of our continue professional development team who staffed the reception zoom, and then had breakout rooms ready to roll if people appeared and wanted to speak. She also handled any confusion and questions about tracks. This helped provide a friendly face

• Coordinated Password for Entire Conference - For added security, we made sure that we set all our Zoom links to require a password, and specifically lopped off the auto-generated password link, so that we would force participants to have to KNOW the password (which was sent in advance via email - or could be given to them upon request by email or Twitter DM). We also strongly discouraged any sharing of this password to others to ensure that the Zooms had that layer of protection. We did not mind that people tweeted ABOUT the content, and several speakers actively encouraged it - but we discouraged the sharing of the actual Zoom links (and in fact never emailed these out, instead just embedding the links in the website as you see below).

• Track Chairs - Fairly common to live conferences, this group performed the role of being a host (introducing speakers, reading questions from the chat box aloud, recording sessions, moderating the discussion, ensuring CME compliance, reminding people to fill out evaluation forms) but also served to monitor the tracks and ensure that we had tech-savvy moderators who would kick out unwanted visitors who might have nefarious intentions (e.g. Zoom bombers). Luckily, we didn't have any disruptions, but having some track chairs that knew what to do if it happened was key.

• Transitions - we had a fairly tight 5 hour conference, with 5 minute transitions. But as you might imagine, many of our workshops ran just a bit late... and so we probably should have had better breaks so we could reset the clock. We also reused the same Zoom links to keep things simple, but if we had separate links