Thank you for your contribution to the virtual Futures Conference programme. These guidelines are given to all Spoken Paper presenters.  Please do your best to follow them to help make the conference a rewarding one for all participants.

Sessions/tracks are scheduled to Tue 8 June at 15:10–20:00 and Wed 9 June at 12:00–18:15. All times are UTC+3.

The Spoken Paper Sessions will be run by using the Zoom service offered by the University of Turku (UTU).  The vulnerabilities and problems that have appeared in media in Public Zoom have not affected the service used at the UTU that is different from the publicly available Zoom service.

> Further information about the conference platform “Howspace” and Zoom.

Before the event

We recommend that you install separate Zoom software on your computer/device. The individually installed Zoom software provides more functionality for managing and using the meeting.

> Download Zoom software

There will be separate test sessions on using the Zoom organized a week before the event. If you feel that you need support with the system, we strongly recommend you to join one of the test sessions.

All times are Eastern European Summer Time, i.e. the time in Finland.

During the event

There will be a chairperson in each parallel tracks of sessions. The chair will introduce the speakers and manage the time to ensure that each speaker has an equal amount of time available.

The chair will also lead the question and answer discussion after the presentation. Audience may comment and ask questions by using the chat. There will be a technical assistant/moderator in each session to monitor the chat. You can concentrate on your presentation as the questions will be presented to you after the presentation.

The length of one spoken paper track is 80–90 minutes. There will be 3–4 presentations in each track. The time allocated for each presentation is limited to 20 minutes, including a chaired discussion. Be prepared to speak about 10 minutes and leave 10 minutes to interaction and discussion. You may wish to use a visual aid such as PowerPoint or Prezi to reinforce your presentation and engage your audience. Please, limit the number of slides to 4–6 in order to stay on schedule. Presenters are sharing their slides to audience in Zoom themselves.

Each track of sessions will be recorded, and videos will be available after the conference in the conference platform. If you do not wish your recorded presentation to be published, please inform the conference secretariat by email futuresconference@utu.fi.

After the event

There is no submission of full papers to the conference. Instead, there are two conference related special issues published in peer-review journals European Journal of Futures Research (EJFR) and On the Horizon (OTH). It is optional to submit a manuscript to one of these journals. If you aim to submit your manuscript to the EJFR, do send your abstract for a review until 15 May 2021. See more information and details about submission from the Call for Research Papers.