When organizing a conference, handling numbers always gives you the greatest pleasure? Are you not afraid of invoices containing typos? Are you happy to allocate every day the registration fees received on your account to the correct booking?

In discussions about hybrid conferences, it never takes long before the topics of technology and costs come up. That also seems to be the reason why opinions don’t seem to vary much: for lots of planners, “hybrid” implies expensive and time-consuming. Is it even possible to put on a successful hybrid event without technical expertise and exploding costs? It is, as we recently learned.

Alerts, warnings, press conferences – since last weekend, the Log4j vulnerability has been omnipresent and, the situation is serious. Companies must now take urgent action to ward off possible attacks from hackers. What does this mean for organizers and all data stored and processed in connection with a conference?

Organizers looking for software for their virtual or hybrid academic conference usually come across online tools pretty quickly that promise a first-class event experience. However, only very few solutions can meet the unique demands of a fully digital or hybrid academic conference.

With everyone eager to see in-person conferences return for good, organizers and participants pin their hopes on the much-discussed rule that people have to be either vaccinated, recovered or tested if they want to attend a public event. If you want or need to implement this for your conferences, keep in mind that participants need to prove their status – but you are not allowed to collect vaccination data.