ACHS 2020: FUTURES
The fifth biennial conference of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies. A large international conference aimed at academics and practitioners - organised initially as an in-person conference this was pivoted in March/April to be a fully virtual conference.
We were left deciding whether to cancel the conference, go ahead as a disparate set of Zoom meetings or, put together a fully virtual conference experience. I led the process of pivoting to fully virtual, modelling price points, sourcing platforms for the main conference and social activities, overseeing social media and creating a comms campaign for our mailing list and website as well as managing speaker and attendee relations.
As this was towards the beginning of the pandemic, we were amongst the first in our sector of this size of conference to be making this decision and therefore didn't have much peer data to reference. This was an incredible learning experience.
Worked alongside Hannah Williams on Operations, with Professor Rodney Harrison as Chair. Supported closely by a Local Organising Committee of Hana Morel, Colin Sterling, Tina Paphitis, Esther Breithoff, Jennie Morgan, Jonathan Gardner, Nadia Bartolini, Chiara Bonnachi.
We used ExOrdo as our conference platform and worked closely with them to develop something that worked for our 700+ speakers across multiple timezones.
