The Corporation Center of Excellence in Marine Sciences (CEMarin) came across an interesting hurdle in 2020. Faced with the upcoming approach of their “International Conference on Marine Sciences” directly in the middle of a pandemic, CEMarine would need to transform their 5-day conference with 1,000+ participants and 100+ speakers into a virtual event, bringing myself and a handful of other moderators and administrators on board to help.
This 6-day virtual event took place between between September 28th, 2020 and October 3rd, 2020, and we had several technical rehearsals on our internal team to do dry-runs of our conference setup of 3 parallel rooms running in Zoom, each with a host, a logistics person and a moderator.
Moderators were the public face of logistics team, running the opening sessions, moderating, closing the session, and running rehearsals with presenters prior to the event, and the logistics people were responsible for organzing audience QA – which was done with the help of a shared Google doc.
Language & Staffing Services
Recruited simultaneous translators hired for the event- Translated & proof-read moderator scripts (ENG-SPA)
- Moderated conference talks, poster & networking sessions
Web & Platform Services
- Provided Zoom platform administration for 6-day conference
- Provided training to multi-lingual audience on Zoom webinar features
- Made basic edits + table customizations for wordpress site
After a few internal rehearsals, we also ran some external rehearsals with event speakers and our translators to make sure they were comfortable with Zoom webinar and simultaneous translation features.
This conference ended up going swimmingly, and everyone was very pleased at how smoothly everything ran with a little over 800 participants in all in attendance, with alot of interaction on the QA sections as well as lots of positive reviews coming in via email in response to the conference, and another ICMES virtual conference in the making in 2023 – so watch out!
