Preliminary Plans for a Hybrid SPLASH 2021

Exciting news–we are working on an approach that we hope will make SPLASH / OOPSLA 2021 the first major hybrid (physical/virtual) conference in PL!

SIGPLAN’s recent poll shows that lots of people really want to get back to in-person conferences. By this October, many countries in the world (including the US, where SPLASH is held in Chicago) will be fully vaccinated, so we expect gathering will be safe. In-person networking opportunities are also important for our emerging researchers, some of whom recently penned a great blog post suggesting a hybrid approach.

But we need to support a virtual option too. Some people, some countries, will not be vaccinated yet–and the vaccine doesn’t work well for everyone. And in any year there are those who cannot travel for financial or other reasons. Thus many more attended SPLASH when it was virtual in 2020, including new community members.

SPLASH 2021 is a chance to try a new, hybrid, approach that can accommodate both needs! And, by supporting virtual attendance, it can reduce carbon emissions compared to going back to the status quo of in-person-only conferences.

Our design goals include Do No Harm–making SPLASH comparable to a physical-only conference for physical attendees, and comparable to an online-only conference for virtual attendees–as well as Expanding Access to the conference and Experimenting with new conference modalities.

How would it work? Speakers will be able to present in-person or virtually in the Chicago time zone. We will use tools like Slido to synchronously take questions from in-person and virtual attendees. We’ll explore virtual presence mechanisms to blend virtual and hybrid spaces in talks and in rooms used for social meetings, technical discussions, and mentoring.

We will use tools like Slack to facilitate asynchronous discussions of papers and other technical topics at any time. And recorded talks will be available for asynchronous viewing as well.

We plan to facilitate people who want to organize local ‘watch parties’ where folks in a geographical area travel to local meetups and watch and discuss SPLASH topics synchronously in their time zone.

What about people in far-off time zones? We plan to mirror the SPLASH program by 8 hours. If SPLASH runs 9am-5pm in Chicago, with 4 sessions, we will mirror the last session 7:30am-9am Chicago time, and the others 5pm-11:30pm Chicago time (see illustration below). What this means is that authors physically present in Chicago can participate in the mirrored session for live Q&A. SPLASH will be blacked out (no talks or synchronous events held) from approximately 11:30pm-7:30am Chicago time, enabling local attendees (especially authors) to get their sleep.

This scheme means that every session will be available during non-sleeping hours, either live or mirrored, to everyone in the world. For example, the figure below shows how the local time in various parts of the world lines up with the conference schedule, and the time(s) that someone from there might choose to participate.

This plan is not final–we want your input. Contact any of the hybridization committee members: Steve Blackburn, Youyou Cong, Alex Potanin, Talia Ringer, and myself.

All of this is subject to final approval of the SPLASH SC–we want to do this, but we need to make sure finances, hotel arrangements, safety etc. all check out. Never fear, in the (unlikely, we think) event that hybrid doesn’t work out, there will be a virtual option regardless.

We hope Hybrid SPLASH 2021 will be a great experience for both physical and virtual attendees–and a chance to try a new and promising model that may be the future of conferences in our field!

So submit to OOPSLA, Onward!, and other SPLASH venues, and see you–virtually or in person–in October!