On-line conference jury

I am on a jury to review computer graphics conference submissions, not for the first time. This year we are doing the entire process on-line.

I have been on this review panel in previous years, and the usual process has been getting on a plane to Chicago and getting put up in a hotel somewhere. Then we spend several days sitting around a large table and going through several hundred submissions together.

To my surprise, I find the on-line version of the process to be much better. There are things that Zoom is better at than real life, and this is one of them.

I think it’s because of the context. When you need to go through a lot of material together, and you need to be thorough, good on-line tools really help the process.

And this year there was a much stronger focus on good on-line tools, for obvious reasons, so everybody became an expert on using them.

In a sense, to compensate for what was missing, we all ended up attaining a kind of shared super power. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.

I wonder whether we will end up going back to an in-person jury next year. And if we do, will we miss this collective on-line experience?

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