Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC2020)

Welcome to the first day of #EPSC2020, our first major virtual conference!  The conference is the annual gathering of the Europlanet Society, the first of which was in 2006.  This has been a labour of love since the spring, when we realised that we would not be meeting together in Granada this year.  Today, a year on from a fabulous conference in Geneva, the planetary community is now spread around the world, watching from home offices and COVID-safe workplaces, and there's no way it'll be quite the same.  But we've done our best to deliver a conference that makes the most of the virtual environment we find ourselves in, being cautious not to overwhelm people with Zoom, whilst hoping to showcase the incredible diversity of European Planetary Science.

Links on the homepage (https://epsc2020.eu) and the programme, but you have to click on the "live briefing" link, enter your login details, and then you get the Zoom link and password.  The live sessions and commenting on the conference are restricted to registered attendees.  

There are many ways that you can do a live meeting, so we did our research on some of the "best-practice" techniques for how others had approached them.  One thing we were sure of was that we didn't want to translate our normal EPSC directly into a virtual meeting, with very long days and lots of parallel sessions.  In particular, we were keen to build on the "nearly-carbon-neutral" conference scheme that had been developed as a means of mitigating the climate crisis.  Following this, EPSC2020 is spread over multiple weeks, with orals and posters replaced by videos and short slideshows that are all pre-recorded so that the audience can digest them at their own leisure, irrespective of time zones.  There were over a thousand abstracts submitted, more than 2/3rds of which were videos (some are public on our Vimeo page, some are private and only accessible on the EPSC website).  We're hoping that the asynchronous discussions will be helpful for people, allowing them to think about questions carefully before answering them, without the terror of standing in front of an audience of 500 people.  

Distribution of #EPSC2020 sessions by programme group.

This will be combined with a programme of live sessions:  a live briefing and interviews with key members of the European community in the morning, with keynote lectures and short courses in the afternoon.  These are combined with 20-minute long session showcases, where the conveners give a short summary of the asynchronous sessions.  These are kept to short blocks, one in the European morning (benefiting our colleagues in Asia), and one in the European afternoon (benefitting our colleagues in the US).  All will be recorded, so that people can catch up in their own time.

This is the first time that we, the organisers, have attempted anything quite like this, and it'll rely on goodwill and participation from the community to make it a success.  Fingers crossed for a successful meeting!