I’ve never thought about this but it’s so true! I go to one annual event that offers sort of “speed dating” sessions to meet some of the other attendees and then follows that with a lot of unstructured social (cocktail hours that everyone attends, etc), so that you can follow up with the people you met and meet more people. Those are always the most productive sessions of the whole thing.
Yup. This article doesn't go into it, but the *good* conferences actually take active steps to include mechanisms to help people meet. A well-run speed-meeting style session can be amazing. (A badly-run one can be soul-crushing)
I also really like a conference lounge or some kind of dedicated space where people can go when they’re not in a lecture or meeting, so that they don’t have to leave the grounds. It makes for a lot of excellent accidental meetings and run-ins. Film festivals occasionally do this well in an industry centre type of place.
I agree with most of what you say here—and even though I hadn’t read your post, for the first conference I ever organized I really worked to maximize the “meeting people you don’t know who can enhance you with and life” part.
Maybe that’s why dozens of people came up to us and told us it was the best conference they’ve attended!
Would love to hear your thoughts on navigating these dynamics in online-only conferences in a future post. In my experience the ‘open-space for community connections’ aspect seems very tricky to work in online only, but if you so hope on that front would be keen to hear it.
My supervisor is part of a team that runs a fully online annual conference in its 4th year, and continuing to work on that aspect is a priority for them.
> Conference speakers: the worst things about conferences
this is unfair and too harsh. big speakers put butts in seats. you can choose to stay in hallway track if u wish. for better or worse people perceive the quality of conference as tied to speaker logos and prestige, and if u dont attract enough quality attendees by having quality speakers you do not have a quality conference.
I gave a paper at an academic philosophy conference recently. It was great for me in that I got some valuable feedback during the discussion following my talk. The talks I attended (some great, some not) were valuable because they allowed me to find out what people were up to, and therefore who I wanted to talk to. But of course the unstructured time (self-organized groups with shared interests informally grabbing lunch, coffee, drinks, dinner, etc.) was by far the most fun and valuable.
In a way, I think the traditional formats for philosophy conferences sometimes serve to protect people from having to actually delve into ideas they don't like. In the "theatre" of a post-talk Q&A, there are moves people make to attack people, evade questions, etc. that are harder to get away with in an unstructured conversation among colleagues. And I suspect this is bad for academic philosophy.
Yeah! To be clear - I think delivering a paper and then having a conversation about it that's useful to the author is a *great* use for conferences. It's not that there should not be content delivery, it's that the content delivery should be a starting point for conversation
I’ve never thought about this but it’s so true! I go to one annual event that offers sort of “speed dating” sessions to meet some of the other attendees and then follows that with a lot of unstructured social (cocktail hours that everyone attends, etc), so that you can follow up with the people you met and meet more people. Those are always the most productive sessions of the whole thing.
Yup. This article doesn't go into it, but the *good* conferences actually take active steps to include mechanisms to help people meet. A well-run speed-meeting style session can be amazing. (A badly-run one can be soul-crushing)
I also really like a conference lounge or some kind of dedicated space where people can go when they’re not in a lecture or meeting, so that they don’t have to leave the grounds. It makes for a lot of excellent accidental meetings and run-ins. Film festivals occasionally do this well in an industry centre type of place.
I agree with most of what you say here—and even though I hadn’t read your post, for the first conference I ever organized I really worked to maximize the “meeting people you don’t know who can enhance you with and life” part.
Maybe that’s why dozens of people came up to us and told us it was the best conference they’ve attended!
Conference page here if your are curious: https://rootsofprogress.org/conference/
We’re planning next year’s event now and our attendees gave us 16,000 words of feedback on how to make it even better.
Oh, cool!! I've heard amazing things about that conference, was sad to have missed it, and have been really curious to know more.
Gonna message you...
I like that you asked for feedback.
Would love to hear your thoughts on navigating these dynamics in online-only conferences in a future post. In my experience the ‘open-space for community connections’ aspect seems very tricky to work in online only, but if you so hope on that front would be keen to hear it.
My supervisor is part of a team that runs a fully online annual conference in its 4th year, and continuing to work on that aspect is a priority for them.
hey! online open space meetings and uconferences are are totally a thing. They take a bit of design, but tbh, not much more than irl ones
> Conference speakers: the worst things about conferences
this is unfair and too harsh. big speakers put butts in seats. you can choose to stay in hallway track if u wish. for better or worse people perceive the quality of conference as tied to speaker logos and prestige, and if u dont attract enough quality attendees by having quality speakers you do not have a quality conference.
I agree entirely! (In fact, that's pretty much what I say in the post)
So maybe we need to add:
> Hyperbole: the worst things about substack posts
I gave a paper at an academic philosophy conference recently. It was great for me in that I got some valuable feedback during the discussion following my talk. The talks I attended (some great, some not) were valuable because they allowed me to find out what people were up to, and therefore who I wanted to talk to. But of course the unstructured time (self-organized groups with shared interests informally grabbing lunch, coffee, drinks, dinner, etc.) was by far the most fun and valuable.
In a way, I think the traditional formats for philosophy conferences sometimes serve to protect people from having to actually delve into ideas they don't like. In the "theatre" of a post-talk Q&A, there are moves people make to attack people, evade questions, etc. that are harder to get away with in an unstructured conversation among colleagues. And I suspect this is bad for academic philosophy.
Yeah! To be clear - I think delivering a paper and then having a conversation about it that's useful to the author is a *great* use for conferences. It's not that there should not be content delivery, it's that the content delivery should be a starting point for conversation
fwiw, I will be adding this to the Event Tips page of my (pre-pandemic, pre-LLM) sortofwiki on climate action:
( https://www.reddit.com/r/ActOnClimate/comments/a5012h/what_you_can_do_for_event_organizers/ )
Thanks!
Really enjoyed this and have forwarded it to some conference organisers I know!
Thank you!
Marsha