How to organize an online conference -- Lessons learned from Cool Stars
  20.5 (virtually cool)
  The virtual meeting was a success. Several people told us that this was "the
best virtual meeting they had seen so far", which, a year into the pandemic and
without a commercial provider in the back, is a great success. The biggest
point of criticism was the timing: We had programming from UTC 17:00-22:00
(evening and night in central Europe, afternoon on the US East Coast, during
the day in South America and on the US West coast, but in the middle of the
night for Asia and Australia). There is no good solution, but at least some
variation in session time might go a long way to make it easier for all to
attend at least some sessions. Feedback also indicates that the schedule was
too compressed. Poster sessions and social contacts with the tool Gathertown
worked out really well for all that used it. Our way of combining several
services (Zoom for plenary and break-out rooms, Zenodo for uploading and
viewing posters and proceedings, Google forms for registration and abstract
submission, gathertown) allowed for a very low-cost meeting with little
overhead (total cost: 600 $ for gathertown, zoom was provided through an
institutional subscription, just 4 people on the LOC).
