The Covid-19 health emergency has practically blocked all the planet for a few months. Almost all sectors have been on stand-by, including live events and conferences. On the contrary the digital sector increased its importance since the majority of events and meetings took place online.

The Biobridges project immediately reacted to this situation experimenting new ways of interacting with the stakeholders involving project activities, both organising successful virtual workshops and participating to events organised by other initiatives.

What are the Biobridges takeaways from this unprecedented experience?

First of all, an online workshop can attract larger audiences and especially can involve stakeholders that typically are excluded from the debate for several reasons (distance, no budget or time to travel, etc.)
This perspective is already in itself a valid reason to switch to online events, but there are also factors such as cost and time savings, the possibility of choosing speakers from anywhere in the world, and last but not least, less impact on the environment that is a fundamental value for our project.

How to overcome the limit of online events?

Even if some benefits have been recognized by everybody there are still some constrains that should be addressed. Contact with other participants is limited to chats within the workshops, created precisely to give the audience the opportunity to ask questions and exchange opinions. The integration of several tools in the same session can partially solve the problem but still the interaction and the collaboration with the participants should be improved. Inter-operability, security and confidentiality of data should also be tackled, together with bandwidth and technical problems.

How this experience will affect our future?

It will be a long shot to replace the live networking, the old and dear handshake and the coffee break, but creating a hybrid event schedule could be a real turning point!
Another alternative could be to limit the number of live events and complement them with ad hoc thematic online sessions.