Cultivating equality

Online conference for WUR and CGIAR Gender Platform

Background

The online conference ‘Cultivating Equality: Advancing Gender Research in Agriculture and Food Systems’ focused on research into new forms of cooperation within agricultural organisations and food chains and gender equality in society in general. It is one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, which calls for bold actions to transform the way we produce and consume food. The congress was organised by the CGIAR Gender Platform and Wageningen University & Research as the EU Gender-Smart partner. The aim was to continue sharing knowledge with an international group of participants for four days in 2021, at the time of the pandemic. Congress by design was asked to design the online part.

599
Participants
4 days
Duration
60 sessions
Meeting Design
Online & hybride
Set-up

By design

We set up and organised the online platform, the studio at WUR and the online technical hosting for them. It was a fully online congress for the participants, but for the speakers it was a hybrid format. They took turns in the studio with the moderators. The other speakers participated online. We advised the client on the sessions’ structure and how to make it as clear as possible for the participants in the online platform. Since the participants were in different time zones, accurate timing and planning was needed so that they could attend the sessions and the speakers and clients could get the right information in time.

Result

This is how we at Congress by design were able to contribute to the main goal of knowledge-sharing. By working with sub-sessions, the groups were not too big. We saw that there was a lot of room to ask questions and talk to each other. Moreover, the sessions were all recorded and shared on the learning platform so that the insights and results remain accessible to all. Due to the different time zones, networking proved less popular; for one participant it was evening and for another it was morning. Therefore, extra attention was paid in the surrounding communication to establishing contacts and the possibility of contacting each other.

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