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GatherTown Posters: Report and Tips
On September 1, 2021 we held three GatherTown poster sessions on the topic of Motion Detection and Correction in MRI. The aim was to provide a forum for people to talk, especially as the interval between face-to-face meetings had become very long due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the Alan Turing Institute for funding the GatherTown subscription
These pages are intended to provide advice for anyone wanting to hold a similar session and reflects my personal opinions and thoughts.
Scheduling and Layout
Three sessions were run at 08:00, 15:00 and 23:00 UTC with the aim that anyone in the world could attend at least two sessions and if people did attend two, then everybody would be able to meet everyone else at least once. This was to try to be fair to people around the world and improve inclusivity. To help conversion to local times and for people to easily add calendar entries, we provided links using dateful.com. (I recommend logging in to dateful.com so that you can edit links.)
Posters are often "2nd class" at conferences so to avoid this, there were no plenaries or keynotes scheduled and the room design was just posters, information stations, and a few private areas for chats. The spawning areas (where attendees first arrive in the room) were in the middle of the room to encourage "bumping into people", though in practice attendees headed straight for posters. There was also a whiteboard but this went unused, and a tile to enable a broadcast to the room, but this was only used once.
To help with submission, review and registration, we used Google Forms and Eventbrite. Further details are below and some MATLAB code is on a GitHub site.
Overall Impression
I think it is great that people from around the world, often experts in their area, can interact easily like this. The GatherTown proximity-based video chat and private poster spaces work well. It is less intimidating to move your avatar around than appear in a Zoom-style video call, but it still favours those who are not shy or know each other.
The idea of three sessions to cover all time zones seemed fair, but the 23:00 UTC session had about 10 attendees (whereas the 08:00 and 15:00 UTC had over 20 each). Whilst I do not know where people were located, I had the impression most were from Europe and North America, even in the 23:00 UTC session.
Online events have advantages for equality, disabilities, cost and climate change. Perhaps because there are no 'travel perks', they also appeal to those who are genuinely interested in the field. The audience may be smaller, but is more engaged. I enjoyed the sessions and am grateful to all who attended and presented.
GatherTown Room Layout
A recommended workflow might be as follows. Practice first on a small temporary room. For the main room, first lay out all the objects (poster booths, chairs etc) before setting any tile effects. I only put impassable tiles in the walls, not the posters, and kept the poster booths fairly close to facilitate movement between posters. Remember to make a private space for each poster and to give those tiles unique IDs. To avoid confusion, I used the submission number as the poster number and tile ID. I decided to allow only image posters (e.g PNG files) to simplify set up. To use PDFs would be more complex as they have to be on a website and a URL provided. Image posters have a small advantage that attendees can click and a red circle is visible to other people at the poster, but this functionality is not obvious and the circle doesn't stand out well.
The poster images were uploaded by presenters as part of the submission using a Google Form. This places the image files in the Google Drive of the owner of the Google Form. To upload into GatherTown, I first downloaded the posters from Google Drive, renamed the files, and then uploaded manually to each GatherTown poster booth.
Posters can have a caption that appears when you hover near a button, but the button is hard to see, the caption font is small and you need to have already opened the poster. In the future I wouldn't use this caption feature.
Posters have a preview that pops up when attendees walk near the poster. I wrote a MATLAB App to crop the poster image to the preview size and save a file for the preview. This preview is acceptable but not ideal because poster titles tend to extend across a whole poster, making them too wide and short for the preview pane. For best readability, type the preview text into PowerPoint and save as a PNG for the preview file.
Submission
A Google Form was used for people to submit a synopsis, contact details and upload their poster as an image file. Once uploaded and submitted, you cannot delete an image from a Google Form so I allowed multiple uploads and used the last. For authors and affiliations, people had to do something like: Smith (a), Jones (b). a) University 1, b) University 2. as one long single entry in the form.
After submissions closed, the Google form was saved locally as a CSV file and a MATLAB script used to autogenerate abstract .tex files for a program booklet. A template LaTeX booklet from Overleaf was used which has a main.tex file and each abstract is uploaded as a separate .tex file. In practice, the abstract files needed a few minor edits for symbols such as <, >, % and degrees. At this stage, the booklet contains links to the posters uploaded in the Google Form and the booklet was circulated just to the organising committee for quality control. (Note the submitted uploads appear in the Google Drive of the person who owns the Google Form and they need to be given read permission for others to view.) Once it was decided on the papers to accept, the main.tex was edited and each abstract tex file edited to remove the link to the Google Drive.
The Overleaf program booklet was downloaded locally as a PDF and then uploaded to a website to which I have access. In the GatherTown room, information points linked to the URL of this site. This enables attendees to see the PDF of the program booklet whilst in the room.
Registration
Eventbrite was used to allow people to register. This is useful as it provides a mechanism for emailing all attendees the GatherTown room link, password, program booklet link and instructions. It also lets you estimate the numbers in advance and this is important in case the layout needs to change, or you need to pay GatherTown for more than 25 attendees (the limit for free rooms). There were 54 people registered and the most that came at any one time was about 23 - this is typical for free online events.
Whilst all the above may sound complicated, it doesn't take very long. The process was perhaps overly complicated for this number of posters, but now there is the mechanism for handling more posters, or similar events in the future.
Resources
GitHub site with MATLAB code to make preview images from poster images, autogenerate booklet and check the GT site: https://github.com/UCL/GatherTownPosters
Sample GatherTown room provided to applicants before submission: https://gather.town/app/5pRltGc2MyWucPw2/moco_demo_poster
The call document including upload instructions.
A PowerPoint poster template (I don't think anyone used it!).
A copy of the Google Form for abstract submission.
The Overleaf template LaTeX and the final program booklet.