Guidelines for Virtual Conferencing – inspired by the COPERNICUS Alliance Online Conference 2019

This paper presents guidelines to prepare, host and evaluate virtual meetings or conferences. It is based on experiences garnered during the COPERNICUS Alliance Online Conference 2019: “Reaching out for the Stars: Consolidating the HESD Constellation” and several other meetings that we facilitated online afterwards. Online conferencing is getting increasingly popular and there are plenty of recommendations on how to do it out there. The same goes for software and tools that are more powerful and user-friendly than ever before and extremely dynamic in their development. Therefore, we don’t want to focus on any software in particular, but rather deliver general guidelines that aim to help organize different kinds of virtual events and pursue different purposes