IAPCO member: GUARANT International
Every year, the European Conference of Family Doctors – DEGAM Annual Congress 2020 (WONCA Europe) is the largest conference focused on general practitioners and family doctors from Europe.
The conference was to take place in December 2020 in Berlin. However, due to the ongoing situation around the COVID-19 pandemic, it was decided to organize the event in a virtual form.
We had two months to prepare the virtual conference, during which it was necessary to connect both the clinical environment and private general practitioners with the platform for the virtual conference. The assignment was clear – 220 lecturers, 30 live workshops, poster discussions, an extensive virtual library, an exhibition, WONCA Village, an opening ceremony, a press conference and a closing of the conference.
We proposed a solution to the client, where the conference ran on the G-con platform which was basically tailor-made in cooperation with a partner company. The platform offers all functions needed for organizing a virtual conference. For the organization of live workshops, we decided to use the CISCO Webex platform which has a relatively wide range of functionalities and thus enabled the necessary interaction during live workshops.
The conference lasted four days and the programme for participants was packed. In the mornings, on the second and third day, there were always 5 parallel workshops.
Throughout the conference, there were 5 plenary sessions and 34 live parallel sections, participants used live chat and attended a virtual exhibition, WONCA Village and poster discussions.
A total of 1,560 participants from 67 countries registered at the virtual conference WONCA Europe 2020 / DEGAM Annual Congress. After the conference, a virtual library was available to all registered participants, containing 783 presentations, as well as individual recordings of sections of the entire four-day conference.
