In a nutshell
WCCM-ECCOMAS Congress will take place in digital version from January 11 to 15, 2021 and all those who already have an accepted paper will be able to propose a recording of their talk via a platform provided and to participate in virtual moments of exchange. 

A digital event
The tragedy of the covid-19 pandemic has made impossible to organise the joint 14th World Congress in Computational Mechanics and ECCOMAS Congress in Paris in July 2020. The enthusiastic response of all the community with more than 400 mini-symposia (MS) and more than 5000 papers accepted, along with an exceptional implication of the young community, has motivated the organisers to do whatever was possible in order not to lose the work and involvement of so many scientists. 

We first tried to postpone the congress, in its classical form, to another date. Despite our effort, this has led us to a dead end. This is why finally we have worked hard to propose the community the best possible virtual event with the best possible digitalised format and technical solutions. Even though we have seen, since the beginning of the covid-19 crisis, many similar events, a virtual WCCM-ECCOMAS has one particular feature: its size. Designing such an event has taken a tremendous effort and this is why we have remained silent. We apologise for that.

We are convinced that this new format, even with some drawbacks, has many advantages, in particular for young scientists but also for the others. For instance, it will become possible to follow all the presentations, browsing easily all the MS, surfing by keywords from one room to another and selecting only the talks that you want. The different talks will be available over a longer period than the classical one-week format. We paid special attention to maintain interaction between the participants to that purpose, direct exchanges with other participants, either by voice or by chat will be possible.

We hope you will embrace our proposal as a mean to create an enthusiastic and successful scientific event for our community. 

Is the organisation going to start from scratch?
In order not to lose all the hard work of everyone, we will start again from the organisation that had been set up for the original event. In particular, we propose to keep all the MS of the accepted papers. All the MS organisers and contributors will soon receive a message asking them if they wish to continue the process and keep their MS and submission as it is. 

How to deal with the different time-zones?
Participants will spread out across the world, which makes the task a little bit tricky. All the talks (20-minute regular talks, semi-plenaries, plenaries) will be pre-recorded at home using online facilities provided by the congress. All the MS will be available at the same time, all along the congress week. It will allow participants to “attend” all the presentations whenever they want. For each MS, a live Q&A session will be organised, as well as chat discussions, where attendees and authors can meet themselves. Semi-plenaries, plenaries and special events (opening, closing ceremonies…) will be released at given times of the week, following a given calendar compatible with a maximum of time-zones (around noon, Paris time-zone). However, they will remain available for the rest of the congress.

How to record my presentation at home?
All the facilities will be provided by the conference through the web. A couple of weeks before the congress, participants will receive an email with all the necessary explanations from our provider for the recording. Participants will record themselves with the provided tool (webcam + presentation with their usual software) as many times as they wish. When they are happy with their performance, they upload the files to our provider‘s cloud and our provider takes care of all post-processing (synchronisation of video and slides, possible reprocessing of sound and images). The final result will be directly available in the corresponding MS virtual room.

What will the new registration fee be?
The fee will be 250€ for delegates and 150€ for students who will present a contribution (with a 10% reduction to IACM  and ECCOMAS members). A special fee of 75€ will be available for non-presenting delegates. Further information will be soon available on the conference website.