repliCATS workshop went virtual – over 550 claims assessed in the week
Our last phase 1 workshop was originally scheduled to run before the 2020 Society for Improving Psychological Sciences (SIPS) conference in Victoria, Canada. Then everything changed.
The repliCATS team created our first virtual workshop designed to accomodate all the original workshop participants scattered around over 10 timezones. What we ended up with was repliCATS2020 workshop week that ran from 12-19 May, where over 150 participants and facilitators contributed 2238 individual judgements, or the equivalent of 560 claims!
That was more than what we completed at the last SIPS face-to-face workshop in 2019.
Of course, that didn’t stop participants re-creating their favourite bits of our face-to-face workshops.
me, trying to replicate the in-person @replicats experience:
(sidenote: team box jelly #4 🏅🏆 wooo!!! congratulations, everyone! 🥳)#repliCATS2020 pic.twitter.com/Q44mWqL3sx
— james (he/mx.) #JunkTerrorBillNow (@lysanderjames) May 19, 2020
The repliCATS team had a few surprises for participants though: we reprised our very popular closing ceremony and awards virtually, including a musical finale that we cannot reproduce here due to copyright issues :D. You’ll just have to take Julia and Dax’s words for it.
#repliCATS2020 is over, but it was the most fun remote event ever I participated in so far. The award ceremony was the absolute highlight! 🥳As you can guess from the number of my claims, I already took part in the @replicats workshop at SIPS 2019 and I want to briefly review. pic.twitter.com/4NF0rg0s7v
— Julia Beitner (@JuliaBeitner) May 19, 2020
I'm still buzzing from that closing ceremony. Final farewell song was a TUNE 🎵🕺
Other awards ceremonies (Oscars, Emmys, Grammys) have a lot to live up to now
— Dax Kellie (@daxkellie) May 19, 2020
The repliCATS team have learned a lot from running this first virtual workshop, which required some significant adjustments compared to face-to-face equivalents. However, participant feedback has left us feeling that we responded successfully, and have a platform upon which we can run future workshops virtually without compromising on participant engagement. Of course some of this success is thanks to our participants themselves who engaged in this new format enthusiastically and with an open mind. So, all that is left to report is a big thank you to the SIPS community. We’re humbled by the contribution this community has made across two huge face-to-face workshops in 2019 and 2020, contributing to 1100 of the 3000 claims we’re aiming to assess!
What’s next for repliCATS?
While this might have been the last big workshop the repliCATS team will run in phase 1 of the SCORE program, we have a little bit left to go. As on 22 June, we have assessments in over 2775 of the 3000 claims. We are hoping to complete assessments by early August 2020, and the repliCATS remote platform will remain live and operational for a bit longer.