(via Benjamin C. Pierce / Dave Farber) *[TL;DR: Please help circulate a new guide for organizers of virtual conferences.]* Dear colleagues, The Association for Computing Machinery recently chartered a Presidential Task Force to gather and disseminate guidance on best practices for virtual conferences, aimed at the many conference organizers moving their events online right now. The task force report, *Virtual Conferences: A Guide to Best Practices <https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences>, *is now available on the ACM web site <https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences> It offers a comprehensive survey of issues, organizational strategies, and technology platforms for successful virtual meetings. We hope that you (and your colleagues) will find this report useful. If you do, we would love to hear about it! And naturally if you have any suggestions for improvement, we would love to hear those too. (The PDF document linked above includes a pointer to a live Google Doc where you can leave suggestions and comments if you like.) If you have recently organized a virtual conference or are organizing one now, we would especially like to include your experiences (how you organized it, how it went, what people thought, a summary of any post-conference survey results, your advice for future conferences, etc.) and add it (or better yet a pointer to it) to the appendix that we’ve provided for such experience reports. Finally, can you please help us make sure this guide reaches the people that need it by forwarding this announcement within your networks (especially, of course, to current conference organizers)? Many thanks! Benjamin Pierce Task force executive editor …on behalf of the entire task force: Crista Videira Lopes <https://www.ics.uci.edu/~lopes/>, University of California, Irvine, USA (Task Force Co-chair) Jeanna Matthews <https://people.clarkson.edu/~jmatthew/>, Clarkson University, USA (Task Force Co-chair, member of ACM Council, Former SGB Chair) Benjamin Pierce <https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/>, University of Pennsylvania, USA (Task Force Executive Editor, SIGPLAN Vice Chair, chair of SIGPLAN ad hoc committee on climate change <https://www.sigplan.org/Resources/Climate/>) Blair MacIntyre <https://blairmacintyre.me/>, Georgia Tech, USA (Chaired IEEE VR 2020) Gary Olson <https://garymolson.com/>, University of California, Irvine, USA (Former SIGCHI Treasurer; Chair of CSCW Steering Committee, chaired CHI, CSCW, DIS, and many non-ACM conferences) Rob Lindeman <https://researchprofile.canterbury.ac.nz/Researcher.aspx?researcherid=4447467>, University of Canterbury, NZ (Chaired IEEE VR 2010) Francois Guimbretiere <https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~francois/>, Cornell University, USA (Chaired UIST 2019) Srinivasan Keshav <https://www.fitz.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-srinivasan-keshav>, University of Cambridge, UK (Former SIGCOMM Chair) Ex-officio members: Vicki Hanson <https://vickihanson.org/> (ACM CEO, Former ACM President) Pat Ryan (ACM COO) Donna Cappo (ACM Director of SIG Services) -- -------------------------------------- Joly MacFie +2185659365 -------------------------------------- -