SWIB conference (Semantic Web in Libraries) is an annual conference, being held in 2024 for the 16th time. It is organized by North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre (hbz) and ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics with around five people every year with mostly little time to organize the conference alongside their usual responsibilities.
In August, we announced that from now on we will use this forum for communications around SWIB conferences but also for discussions and exchange between and beyond conferences:
The forum will be a permanent open space where community members can meet, openly exchange ideas, and organize themselves around different interests. During SWIB24 and forthcoming SWIB renditions it will be used for announcements, q&a, applause and other reactions, discussions, communication with workshop participants, and more. The forum is based on the popular Discourse software.
In this post, we will take a deeper look at our motivations, plans, and ideas for using the Discourse forum software for communications around an international conference and the challenges we faced setting it up.
Historical background
During the time of the Covid19 pandemic where traveling and big gatherings were restricted, we had already held three online-only conferences (SWIB20, SWIB21, SWIB22). During an entire week, SWIB participants would meet daily in a designated two-hour time frame that accommodates most time zones (UTC 14–16:30) for a live stream with presentations and – on one dedicated day – for hands-on workshops that happened in a BigBlueButton conference room.
With the online conferences, registration numbers went far up, from 150–180 for physical conferences to around 450 registered SWIB20 participants in 2020 and over 800 registrations in 2022.[1]
Taking responsibility to reduce greenhouse emissions
For SWIB23, we met in-person again in Berlin but we already knew that we would not want to continue inviting people from all over the world to fly to Germany for SWIB conferences.[2] There was a SWIB23 breakout session (introduction slides) where we discussed how to have an international conference with direct contact but without flying people across continents. Here are some notes from that session:
SWIB24 takes a step in this direction to build and strengthen the international SWIB community online by launching this forum. For future SWIBs we will come back to the idea of local SWIB “nodes” where people can have a wholesome and, admittedly, needed direct exchange in person.
2020–2022: Online chat for conference communication
From 2020 to 2022, to enable exchange between participants and not have everybody sitting isolated in front of the presentation stream, we had set up a chat platform with Mattermost that was available some time before the conference until a few weeks after the conference. After that, contents would be deleted forever.[3]
The chat was used for announcements of upcoming talks and feedback for the speakers – by posting a comment or using the “clapping” reaction – and sometimes this would lead to deep and detailed discussions and genuine knowledge exchange.[4]
Another and crucial use of the chat was communication between workshop facilitators and participants. As we are dealing with hands-on online workshops, this communication revolved around joining and setting up the video conference and setting up the needed software for participating.
From temporary chat to permanent forum
As we were using a chat platform quite successfully three times, why do we move to another solution?
Drawbacks of the online chat solution
While the chat worked fine for the past conferences, it comes with some drawbacks when we are looking for a more sustainable, permanent solution:
- Losing the conference record: Obviously, one big drawback is the transient nature of a chat because it is deleted after only a few weeks.
- Manual data syncing: Furthermore, a lot of manual work resulted from syncing data between the ConfTool system used for workshop registration and the Mattermost chat.[5]
- Costs: We have paid for a service provided by an IT cooperative (ColloChat, five stars) for SWIB20–22 and the price was right for a temporary solution. However, third-party hosting Mattermost for a permanent SWIB chat would be too costly.
Requirements for a sustainable conference communications solution
What are the basic requirements a SWIB communication solution should meet?
It’s not all that much:
- Conference participants can give feedback to speakers (reactions such as applause, questions etc.) or start parallel discussions amongst participants
- While dropping our conference system (ConfTool) for conference registration, we still need some registration process for workshops and a way for facilitators and participants to communicate before and during the conference.
- We’d also like the SWIB communication platform to be persistent to enable more continuity in communications and discussions.
Discourse to the rescue
Starting last year, hbz has been working with Discourse to provide the forum metadaten.community for German-speaking metadata practitioners. Naturally, we started looking into Discourse as a communication platform for SWIB as we – like metadaten.community – could host it ourselves on hbz servers with minimal resources.
Already in its core version, Discourse is a very powerful, highly configurable forum software. In addition, there are lots of plugins for activating additional features.
We have tested different ways of using Discourse for SWIB and tried out several category structures and plugins. For SWIB24, we settled on using Discourse in a rather simple fashion:
- We have created a topic (that is the Discourse term for “thread”) for every talk and workshop that will happen at SWIB24.
- We have created a conference overview page that resembles the programme page on the website, linking to every talk and workshop.
- For structuring the topics we made some use of categories and tags:
- There is one main category for the whole SWIB24 conference, allowing us to add SWIB25, SWIB26 etc. in later years.
- SWIB24 has two sub-categories, for grouping the two formats we have at SWIB: Talks@SWIB24 and Workshops@SWIB24
- We use tags, to group the workshops by the time-slots they will happen in: ws-slot-eu-africa , ws-slot-americas , ws-slot-asia-aus
- We also use tags to group talks by the session they will happen in: s01-opening m s02-data-and-interop , s03-generating-ld , s04-lod4end-users , s05-workflows , s06-vocabularies
- The power and versatility of Discourse makes the UI and UX not as intuitive as one would wish and often leads to a little confusion. To mitigate this, we decided to limit the features we are using:
- We disabled the Discourse chat function as it adds a lot of confusion when you have chat and forum functionality in one site.
- We refrained from using Discourse groups as a way of grouping user accounts and limiting communication to a group of users.
The biggest challenge: workshop registration and communication
Whenever we host a virtual conference free of charge, the biggest challenge is to have a workflow for workshop registration and communication that suits both the workshop participants and the workshop facilitators. However, the biggest problem with free workshops is not a technical but a social one: People register for a free workshop and then don’t show up when the workshop is happening.
For example, at SWIB21, we asked workshop facilitators for the maximum number of workshop participant. The limits ranged from 24 to 80 participants. The higher the limit was set, the poorer was the attendance rate of the actual workshops, ranging from 62% to only 32% of registered participants. This was unfortunate, as we put quite some resources into managing waiting lists and syncing registered participants with the respective workshop chat channel in Mattermost while in the end lots of registered participants would not show up. It also could be quite frustrating for workshop facilitators who put lots of time into preparing workshops and then have to work with only a fraction of the anticipated number of workshop participants.
A social problem that can not be solved with technology
The actual problem is a social problem that can not be solved by technical means. One solution would be charging a substantive workshop fee but we don’t want to do that – because we don’t need to and we don’t want the administrative overhead of handling transactions, participant and waiting lists.
The question is: How to best manage the registration process for free workshops so that we have a turnout of active participants that is neither only a fraction of nor does not significantly exceed the maximum limit facilitators communicate to us? As we still do not have an answer to this, we decided to try a new approach this year but minimize the costs on our side as organizers by choosing a solution that demands minimum effort for managing workshop registrations.
Using Discourse events for workshops
With Discourse, this will look like this:
- We install the Discourse Calendar (and Event) plugin and make every topic we have created for a workshop an event. Click through the list of workshops and you will see that all of them have a box that enables people to “register” for a workshop by clicking “Going”:
- As soon as people have clicked the “Going” button, they have
- registered for the workshop and
- subscribed to updates on the workshop topic.
- With this, we and the workshop facilitators can see how many and which people have registered for the workshop and they have also the means of contacting all these registrants by adding a post to the topic. For example, they could ask registrants one week before the conference to kindly remove their registration if they won’t make it.
- We won’t have any way of limiting the number of registrants, though, but we would not know anyway where to set the number to not have too many participants.
- If people have technical questions with regard to a workshop it is possible to directly open a separate topic or to move off-topic questions to a new topic.
- To give workshop facilitators the means to moderate their workshop topic, we will either give them ownership of the post or make them moderators (see the Discourse moderation guide).[6]
Outlook / Ideas
We are looking forward to SWIB24 and we think this forum serves as an excellent basis for establishing a permanent place for lively and in-depth community communication. We already had some ideas for addressing even more tasks around SWIB organization and programme creation that we will pursue in the future, for example:
- Evaluate Discourse for abstract submission and reviewing as well as for adding some possibilities for the community to further participate in designing the programme.
- Move the swib.org website to Discourse, e.g. by using Landing Pages Plugin 🛩 - plugin - Discourse Meta (as proposed by @literarymachine). Currently, we have to put additional resources into creating and maintaining the website that is built with a custom Perl- and pandoc-based process (see the the GitHub repo).
- We might also consider a BigBlueButton integration to enable participants having spontaneous video meetings during the conferences (or in between).
Join the conversation
We are very happy to have set up this forum and encourage everybody interested in SWIB to register. We will be sharing further plans for using this forum for discussion within the community and are looking forward to building this up together!
Registration numbers are a problematic metric when dealing with a conference free of charge and with an openly available live stream. On the one hand, people who registered do not participate in the conference and on the other side there are people who end up watching the live stream without being registered. ↩︎
We already had a breakout session at SWIB as early as 2018 about the environmental cost of traveling and possible changes for the SWIB format. So these thoughts had been ripening for some time. ↩︎
As we haven’t archived the chat somewhere there is no record left of SWIB communication from 2020 to 2022. We don’t even have any screenshots for illustrating this post. ↩︎
To get an impression on the discussion that would emerge, see this archived chat ↩︎
We managed to automatically create a Mattermost account for every participant registration in ConfTool but had to do a lot manually for workshop egistrations. However, for a free online conference, we do not necessarily need a conference registration, so that we now leave out ConfTool for participant management. ↩︎
Similarly, we might give a moderator of a SWIB session ownership over the topics of talks within this session. ↩︎