Designing a Hybrid Academic Workshop: Lessons from the Field

The transformative impact of Information and Communications Technology on organizations and society has opened many new areas of study for the IS academic field. To kick start research into emerging topics, pre-conference academic workshops are organized to bring together scholars in newly established research areas. These workshops engender enthusiasm but are often “one off” events. Financing these workshops is a challenge, with most barely breaking even. The authors’ objective is to investigate ways to increase the effectiveness of academic workshops by adding a “virtual” pre-workshop event without any additional cost. In the virtual event, participants use free versions collaborative technologies to present their work to researchers joining from around the world. This paper reports on several years of investigation of programs to combine virtual events with face-to-face workshops. Lessons learned are reported and recommendations are presented for expanding the use of social media in support of academic research activities.