The CataLight Young Scientist Symposium (CYSS, www.cyss2020.de) was planned as an on-site conference in Ulm, Germany, in autumn 2020. Its board of organization consists of PhD students and early-career, i.e. within the first two years after obtaining their PhD, postdocs who perform research within the framework of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft funded Transregional Collaborative Research Center TRR234, CataLight , a project with particular emphasis on artificial photocatalysis and the photoactivated hydrogen evolution reaction. Similarly, the target audience of CYSS were young scientists at an early career stage, i.e., PhD students, postdocs, and graduate students, working in the fields of photocatalysis and photochemistry. However, when faced with the ongoing Covid-19 crisis in Europe and Germany in the early planning stage of the conference, we decided to move the format from completely on-site to fully online. This move was not unprecedented, as several entirely online conferences already existed , established on-site conferences switched to an online format , or novel online formats emerged . Advantages of online conferences are numerous and have recently been summarized by Roos et al. , and include low costs, as no venue or catering has to be organized, environmental friendliness, with onsite conferences producing considerably more carbon dioxide and waste than online ones due to long-distance travelling , and time efficacy, as participants may join or opt-out from any talk they would like to listen or not listen to at a whim and can concentrate, e.g., on child care. The most severe disadvantage of such a format is probably the high level of anonymity, as participants rarely meet "face to face", and the associated lack of networking, which is especially vital in the career planning of young researchers . When faced with the organization of an online conference, we quickly realized the lack of a unified organizational standard on how to organize one. In fact, it seemed as many online conferences use a combination of several, often proprietary or closed-source, services to offer a full conference experience: Google Forms to obtain registration data, Zoom to host talks, and Twitter to host a poster session . Additionally, it has been argued that the higher technological complexity of online formats might make them even more expensive than on-site conferences , even though some digital formats reported reduction of costs to 50 % of onsite ones , calling the economic feasibility of online formats into question. In this report, we want to share our experiences in the organization of CYSS. Special emphasis was laid on the use of open source software (OSS) solutions, which drastically decrease the cost of organization, and data privacy, which is not guaranteed when using third party apps like GoogleForms or Twitter. Additionally, we discuss both synchronous and asynchronous means of inter-participant communication, which could eliminate the condition of meeting at the same time and space. We also include feedback by conference participants, collected in an postconference poll (n = 30), and provide an outlook for the future of scientific (chemistry) conferences and how they can profit from including online meetings.