Balisage 2021 will be online - possibly with with local face to face meet-ups

Speakers and attendees will be welcome to participate online at Balisage 2021. We will use the Whova conference portal for online participation, including presentations, questions and answers, and social interaction.

If it is safe and practical, we will encourage groups of Balisage participants to gather in local groups, to participate in these groups, and to enjoy the companionship of fellow markup enthusiasts. We will provide more details on that much closer to the conference dates!

To disturb the circadian rhythms of attendees as little as possible, we'll have fewer talks per day. We will begin the earliest talk at 10 am Eastern Time (7 am Pacific Time), and end the last talk of the day at 5 pm Eastern (11 pm in most of continental Europe). The full program, when published, will show times in EDT and an Interactive Schedule-at-a-Glance convert will convert them for the convenience of attendees world wide.

Conference Portal

Balisage 2021 will be accessed through a Portal on Whova, the same tool we used for Balisage 2020. The conference presentations will be in Zoom, available only through Whova. There are several reasons we are using Whova:

  • Whova provides tools for social interactions that enable some unstructured conversation. (This is not as good as a face-to-face event, but we hope it is better than nothing.)
  • Whova provides tools for managing Question and Answers and similar interactions with presenters.
  • Restricting access this way reduces the anxiety some of our participants and their employers have about participating in a Zoom-based event.
  • Restricting access this way will reduces the changes that pranksters and people with unfriendly intent will disrupt Balisage.

Balisage is an Interactive Event

Balisage has always been a highly interactive event, and we are doing our best to continue that tradition. This means that we will not record Balisage, we are explicitly leaving time in the program for questions and answers, we are scheduling small group conversations, and we will provide times for attendees to do tech-checks to ensure that they can ask questions and participate in conversations.

The proceedings of Balisage 2021 will be freely available with the proceedings from all previous Balisage events in the Balisage Series on Markup Technologies.