CONGRESS 55
21 days (initially!), with only workers who
were deemed by the government as being
essential workers allowed to go to
work under strict conditions. Little did
we know that South Africa would still be
under lockdown conditions, albeit under
a less stringent level, by the time of
the Congress!
As the Society had never held a virtual
congress before, and in the absence
of the Local Organising Committee
who had withdrawn as they were of the
opinion that a virtual congress was not
a viable option, Council decided to
step in and be pioneers. A small group
(consisting of Council members, our
Administrator, previous Administrator
and Scientific Committee chairs) set
about putting together, from scratch,
what they hoped would prove to be a
successful online congress, in only 3
months.
Format
The services of a digital communications
provider (DigiComm Facilitation)
were employed to host the Congress
on Zoom ® . This service provider had access
to three different Internet Service
Providers between which connectivity
could be switched in the event of
streaming issues or errors. The provider
also had a full Zoom ® account. This was
required because the freeware version
of Zoom ® limits the duration of continuous
use of Zoom ® webinar to 40 minutes
and number of attendees to 100.
The Zoom ® host had full control of the
Zoom ® session to be able to control access
to the event and control audio and
video access.
The decision was taken that the virtual
Congress would take the form of a
Zoom webinar, where presenters were
required to make a pre-recorded video
of their presentation and submit these
two weeks prior to the start of Congress.
Early submission of the video
presentations facilitated the allocation
of submissions to specific sessions and
quality checking of the video and audio
feeds. Where required, presenters were
requested to re-record their presentations,
particularly if the audio quality
was not good. Live Question and Answer
sessions with the presenters and
keynote speakers were held at the end
of each session. It was decided to limit
the length of each Congress session to
a half-day (compared to the usual fullday
event of a physical congress) for
three days. Presentation time was shortened
to reduce the possibility of fatigue
associated with sitting in front of a computer
all day. Standard presentations
were limited to 10 minutes and keynote
presentations to 20 minutes.
A Zoom ® meeting format was used to
Figure 1: The breakdown of delegate attendance (141) from around the world
(Courtesy of Erica Joubert).
host the one-day research-skills workshop
and the Annual General Meeting
of the Society. Poster presentations
were hosted on the Twitter ® platform
(Reshef et al., 2020), which allowed nonattendees
to view the posters and participate
in an online discussion.
The Dryfta ® app, a congress organisation
platform, which had been used for
previous congresses, was retained for
administrative aspects of the Congress
such as registrations, payments, abstract
submissions, programme schedule
and presenter profiles. Liaison with
the technical staff of Zoom ® and Dryfta ®
enabled the integration of the two software
platforms.
All submissions were stored in the
‘Cloud’ on Google Drive ® to facilitate
backup and ease of access for multiple
people. Abstract submissions needed
to be edited using HTML coding to ensure
streamlined web content on Dryfta
® .
A major concern of the committee was
uninterrupted, high-quality internet
connectivity, both for hosting the Congress
and for delegate access. The cost
of data in South Africa is high in comparison
to other countries and coverage
frequently poor in many areas. Consequently,
delegates received a free 5GB
data package to use for Congress.
Guideline documents
Because online conference attendance
was a relatively new experience for
many participants, there was a considerable
amount of uncertainty and some
reluctance amongst members to embrace
the use of new technologies. Surprisingly,
the platform that initially met
with the most resistance was Twitter ® !
Hence much effort went into developing
guidelines on how to register on the
various platforms, how to convert a presentation
into a video (*.mp4 format) and
how to achieve the best video results.
For the posters, Powerpoint ® templates
were developed for a four-panel poster
with an example of a poster being created
on Twitter ® along with guidelines
on how to use Twitter ® . Guidelines were
developed for presenters, attendees,
session chairs and poster presenters.
Live training was held for session chairs
to ensure that they would be familiar
with the format and workings of each
session. We ensured we had back-up
chairs for each session in case the dedicated
session chair lost connection etc.
In order to test the various systems, several
dry runs were held in the week prior
to the Congress. Extensive use was
made of social media posts across Facebook
® , LinkedIn ® and Twitter ® , as well
as email, to disseminate information
and guidelines. All documents were
available on the Congress website for
ease of viewing and downloading.
‘Curveballs’
Despite the dry runs prior to the Congress,
the opening session experienced
a major technical issue in that the videos
would not play! It was the organising
committee’s intention to have paid-up
delegate access available from only the
Dryfta ® app. This was a security consideration
taken to ensure that Zoom ® links
were not shared with non-delegates.
However, due to rapid updates being
applied frequently across all software
platforms, the integration between Dryfta
® and Zoom ® failed for the playing of
the videos. This necessitated emailing
the Zoom ® links to delegates and restarting
the session.
Grassroots Vol 20 No 3 September 2020
06