The increased democratization of the creation, implementation, and attendance of academic conferences has been a serendipitous benefit of the movement toward virtual meetings. The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated the transition to online conferences and, in parallel, their democratization, by necessity. This manifests not just in the mitigation of barriers to attending traditional physical conferences but also in the presentation of new, and more importantly attainable, opportunities for young scientists to carve out a niche in the landscape of academic meetings. Here, we describe an early “proof of principle” of this democratizing power via our experience organizing the Canadian Computational Neuroscience Spotlight (CCNS; crowdcast.io/e/CCNS), a free 2-day virtual meeting that was built entirely amid the pandemic using only virtual tools. While our experience was unique considering the obstacles faced in creating a conference during a pandemic, this was not the only factor differentiating both our experience and the resulting meeting from other contemporary online conferences. Specifically, CCNS was crafted entirely by early career researchers (ECRs) without any sponsors or partners, advertised primarily using social media and “word of mouth,” and designed specifically to highlight and engage trainees. From this experience, we have distilled “10 simple rules” as a blueprint for the design of new virtual academic meetings, especially in the absence of institutional support or partnerships, in this unprecedented environment. By highlighting the lessons learned in implementing our meeting under these arduous circumstances, we hope to encourage other young scientists to embrace this challenge, which would serve as a critical next step in further democratizing academic meetings.

学术会议的创建，实施和出席的民主化程度不断提高，这是虚拟会议运动的偶然好处。2019年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行加速了向在线会议的过渡，并在必要时加快了其民主化的速度。这不仅体现在减少参加传统物理会议的障碍上，而且还表现在年轻科学家们提出新的，更重要的是可以获得的机会，在学术会议领域开辟了一个新市场。在这里，我们通过组织加拿大计算神经科学聚焦（CCNS； crowdcast.io/e/CCNS）的经验，描述了这种民主化力量的早期“原理证明”，为期两天的免费虚拟会议，该会议完全是在大流行期间仅使用虚拟工具而建立的。考虑到在大流行期间创建会议时遇到的障碍，尽管我们的经验是独特的，但这并不是使我们的经验以及由此产生的会议与其他现代在线会议区别开来的唯一因素。具体而言，CCNS完全由早期职业研究人员（ECR）制作，没有任何赞助商或合作伙伴，主要使用社交媒体和“口口相传”做广告，并专门设计用来突出和吸引学员。从这一经验中，我们提炼出“ 10条简单规则”作为设计新的虚拟学术会议的蓝图，尤其是在这种前所未有的环境中，在没有机构支持或伙伴关系的情况下。