Special Talk
 

"A Cyber Real Cyber Model for Running International Conferences" By Nian-Shing Chen, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Abstract

One of the main purposes for participants attending international conferences is to meet people, who are doing research in the same field/topic, for exchanging ideas, sharing experiences and even looking for joint collaborative research. However, the time is always very limited during the conference; many participants had an experience that once they found someone who shares the same research interests, it is time to say goodbye. Though, many people would say let’s keep in touch and correspond by emails for further exchanges and discussions, we all know it just does not work in this way for most of cases. How do we cope with this issue by taking the advantage of cyber community? I will introduce in this talk a cyber-real-cyber model for running an international conference in blended mode to solve this problem. The basic idea is to extend the time span of an international conference to both before the physical conference and after the physical conference. A web-based community conference platform with many Web 2.0 features has been developed to facilitate participants to start with communications and discussions with those authors they are interested before the physical conference. This would then shorten the social distance among these people who have been getting to know each other in cyber space, so when they finally meet together at the conference physically, they can have a better opportunity for arranging small group meetings and exchanges. Furthermore, after the conference, those people who have already established connections during the conference can continue to exchange and collaborate together via the asynchronous and synchronous cyber office environments supported by the web-based community conference platform.