For several weeks now, a fraudulent hotel provider named Converia Travel has been active in the area of academic conferences. Here’s what organizers and participants should be on the lookout for.

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?

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.

Live content can make a conference more vivid, but it doesn’t take live sessions only to achieve this. Presentations and other parts of the program can be pre-recorded and uploaded prior to the start. In addition, there are many organizers aiming for an interesting schedule with live sessions, but still want to offer participants the opportunity to view all the sessions later at their leisure.