However, what are people's experience with electronic meetings? What resources are required to set up an electronic conference? The CSA does not have the resources to organise such a conference on its own. We would need to work in conjunction with an academic organisation, for example, which has spare Web space available and students who have the time spend on setting up an electronic conference.
There is often a registration fee for electronic conferences. Does this severely restrict the number of people who take part? If you have taken part in an electronic conference, has it been of great benefit to you, or do you have recollections of Web pages you never got round to looking at, and e-mail messages you never read properly because of the pressing distractions of your day-to-day work which surrounded you? Is it better to get away from the office for a day or two to meet with other people in a focussed environment?
We would very much welcome your response to the above questions.
As one of the most experienced e-conference organisers (WATOC96, ECTOC-1 and ECHET96, with ECTOC-3 underway) I feel qualified to respond to this. 1. Yes, it requires significant resource, both in time, in knowledge, software (developed for the conference, and off the shelf) and organisation 2. We have NOT charged fees. Dr Barry Hardy for example, organises e-conferences more or less full time, and he does have to charge fees, typically about 50 pounds. 3. As for not reading web pages or e-mails because of distractions, I doubt whether ANYONE manages to either attend each talk/poster at a real event, or read all submissions in an e-conference. We recognised this by offering "molecular similarity" browsing in ECHET96, ie suggestions for the 5 nearest neighbours to any article you might be reading. 4. Many people make the mistake of assuming that an e-conference is a direct replacement for a physical one. They are quite different things! People interact as humans at each in quite different ways, and it is fundamentally wrong to compare the two. E-conferences offer searchability, 3D models, editability, error free re-usability etc. Physical conferences offer people in a different format!! Our best model is the Int Society of Heterocyclic chemistry, which runs a physical conference every two years, and interleaves this with an e-event in the other years. The MGMS has a similar paradigm. Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)