Everything you say sounds like the way effective altruism conferences have been run for years :)
In 2018, me (a volunteer facilitator) and one of the two main hosts dragged the keynote speaker into a room for an ad hoc session that eventually led to the Happier Lives Institute!
Here is my cynical take on why most conferences are “Level 1”: the purpose of most conferences is *not* to form connections between people. It is to get people to buy into something: a product, a corporate strategy, etc.
Most conferences I attend are industry conferences, where many of the attendees (sellers) are there to sell products to other attendees (buyers). Many of the speakers are sellers who have paid the conference for the opportunity to speak: no wonder the conference organizers want to fill the room. In theory, the buyers are there to learn and make connections. But in practice, a lot of them are motivated by taking a day off of work, traveling somewhere exciting (whether a different city or just their local downtown), getting wined and dined, etc.
Another category of conference you mention are corporate events: where everyone from a company comes together for a day or two. While part of the goal here is to build connections across the company, the more essential goal is to get people to buy into the corporate culture/strategy/mission. Presentations are coordinated by senior execs to present a cohesive message to the broader team. Applause is expected. Dissent is discouraged. It's more of a political rally than a seminar. The point of bringing people together in a room for this is to make it harder for people to misunderstand or (god forbid) disagree with the senior team’s point of view. The last thing you want is people mingling in the hallways and thinking up new ideas that conflict with what the exec committee has spent the last 6 months deciding on.
This is obviously a very cynical take. And no doubt that there are a whole host of events that would benefit from your advice. But I think a lot of the reason you see events that don’t seem designed to encourage connections is because that isn’t the goal.
I planned to put these thoughts in my feedback, but I’ll share here as well to socialize them.
Both at Progress Con and at conferences in general, I’d love a “looking for a new conversation” sign to stand under to make it easy to pick up a new one as needed with minimal awkwardness. This also reduces random and potentially derailing interruptions in the midst of great conversations that have already gone deep.
I’ve only seen this done once, but I love when conferences provide a go-to icebreaker question that everyone understands to be a sign of friendliness.
You posted this while I was at a conference, and it got me thinking. (This was a math conference, i.e., a conference of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, sharing recent results in a specific subfield of math.) It's interested to see people's comments here, because it makes clear that there are a lot of different things that go by the name of "conference".
One particularity of math conferences is that math papers are well-known for being hard and unpleasant to read. So a speaker has a chance to communicate something that a paper does not, both because the speaker can be informal/imprecise in useful ways that make their subject more approachable (in a way which paper-writing conventions make impossible), and because people might listen to the speaker when they won't even try to read the paper.
(I understand that at lots of academic conferences in other disciplines people simply read out a completely prepared text. This seems absolutely bonkers to me, for the reason you mention, that it's a very inefficient use of time. But I'm more interested in thinking about the kind of conferences I know better.)
I feel like some topics of conferences are exciting, and some aren't. From what you say about Progress Conference, it sounds like it's an exciting topic. I think there could still be a role for conferences even on non-exciting topics, but I suspect the design might have to be different.
You had me wondering how these well thought out principle of 'engineering' might be applied to less focused community building events... like the offshoots of your Trampoline experiences. Attendee curation seems a mighty obstacle at odds with wanting to maximize attendance... and also may conflict with the overly generous desire to believe that all attendees are equally willing and able to contribute rather than merely observe.
Everything you say sounds like the way effective altruism conferences have been run for years :)
In 2018, me (a volunteer facilitator) and one of the two main hosts dragged the keynote speaker into a room for an ad hoc session that eventually led to the Happier Lives Institute!
Great Article.
Here is my cynical take on why most conferences are “Level 1”: the purpose of most conferences is *not* to form connections between people. It is to get people to buy into something: a product, a corporate strategy, etc.
Most conferences I attend are industry conferences, where many of the attendees (sellers) are there to sell products to other attendees (buyers). Many of the speakers are sellers who have paid the conference for the opportunity to speak: no wonder the conference organizers want to fill the room. In theory, the buyers are there to learn and make connections. But in practice, a lot of them are motivated by taking a day off of work, traveling somewhere exciting (whether a different city or just their local downtown), getting wined and dined, etc.
Another category of conference you mention are corporate events: where everyone from a company comes together for a day or two. While part of the goal here is to build connections across the company, the more essential goal is to get people to buy into the corporate culture/strategy/mission. Presentations are coordinated by senior execs to present a cohesive message to the broader team. Applause is expected. Dissent is discouraged. It's more of a political rally than a seminar. The point of bringing people together in a room for this is to make it harder for people to misunderstand or (god forbid) disagree with the senior team’s point of view. The last thing you want is people mingling in the hallways and thinking up new ideas that conflict with what the exec committee has spent the last 6 months deciding on.
This is obviously a very cynical take. And no doubt that there are a whole host of events that would benefit from your advice. But I think a lot of the reason you see events that don’t seem designed to encourage connections is because that isn’t the goal.
Very insightful and completely agree.
I planned to put these thoughts in my feedback, but I’ll share here as well to socialize them.
Both at Progress Con and at conferences in general, I’d love a “looking for a new conversation” sign to stand under to make it easy to pick up a new one as needed with minimal awkwardness. This also reduces random and potentially derailing interruptions in the midst of great conversations that have already gone deep.
I’ve only seen this done once, but I love when conferences provide a go-to icebreaker question that everyone understands to be a sign of friendliness.
You posted this while I was at a conference, and it got me thinking. (This was a math conference, i.e., a conference of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty, sharing recent results in a specific subfield of math.) It's interested to see people's comments here, because it makes clear that there are a lot of different things that go by the name of "conference".
One particularity of math conferences is that math papers are well-known for being hard and unpleasant to read. So a speaker has a chance to communicate something that a paper does not, both because the speaker can be informal/imprecise in useful ways that make their subject more approachable (in a way which paper-writing conventions make impossible), and because people might listen to the speaker when they won't even try to read the paper.
(I understand that at lots of academic conferences in other disciplines people simply read out a completely prepared text. This seems absolutely bonkers to me, for the reason you mention, that it's a very inefficient use of time. But I'm more interested in thinking about the kind of conferences I know better.)
I feel like some topics of conferences are exciting, and some aren't. From what you say about Progress Conference, it sounds like it's an exciting topic. I think there could still be a role for conferences even on non-exciting topics, but I suspect the design might have to be different.
You had me wondering how these well thought out principle of 'engineering' might be applied to less focused community building events... like the offshoots of your Trampoline experiences. Attendee curation seems a mighty obstacle at odds with wanting to maximize attendance... and also may conflict with the overly generous desire to believe that all attendees are equally willing and able to contribute rather than merely observe.
Thank you for writing this! I love how you were open and transparent about something you worked on too!!!
It was great talking to you at the conference. Thanks for this write-up ; count me as an ally in the quest for conference progress.
It was really great talking to you, too!