Virtual scholarly events usually involve some combination of videoconferencing and chat wrapped around a conference platform that manages the abstracts, papers, slides, and other material accompanying the live or recorded presentations. One such conference system is OpenReview, an open source software toolkit created by Andrew McCallum that has become the standard submission and review platform for many of the major academic conferences in artificial intelligence and adjacent fields.  User feedback about the platform over the past year has identified the importance of synchronous, realtime interaction at various phases of planning and holding events, interactions that are currently not well-supported by Open Review or its competitor platforms. Funds from this grant will allow McCallum to add synchronous discussion features to a set of points in the OpenReview conference workflow, from deliberations by reviewers and program committees to the actual talks given by presenters. Several event organizers are already lined up as testers and early adopters, from relatively small community workshops to the massive NeurIPS conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning.  All developed code will be made available in full on GitHub.