In the web 2.0 era, online communication over a variety of social media platforms like email, Twitter, Facebook, and Skype transcends national boundaries enabling worldwide participation without the need for visas, or the time and expense of international travel. Scientists are increasingly publishing their work on blogs containing comments and subscription options that trigger customizable communications to these platforms, and pioneering the use of open notebook science to share and discuss their experimental data online.5 Likewise, online tools and platforms that emulate a conference are becoming more readily available. Real-time webinars are now common in which an author presents material online and discusses his or her work with attendees, but these are typically single presentations and lack the collective interaction of multiple talks in a conference symposium. Strangely, online conferences are still uncommon in chemistry circles, even though chemists were some of the first to use the internet for scientific communication, with examples like the online ConfChem conference dating back two decades.