Ways to experiment with conferences
Yesterday I wrote about why I think technical conferences underdeliver. Coincidentally, Evan sent me this quote from Seth Godin's blog yesterday:
We've all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.
What should we do about it?
If we are collectively spending 6 careers at the SEG Annual Meeting every autumn, as I asserted yesterday, let's put some of that cognitive surplus to work!
I suggest starting to experiment with our conferences. There are so many tools: unconferences, idea jams, hackdays, wikithons, and other participative activities. Anything to break up sitting in the dark watching 16 lectures a day, slamming coffee and cramming posters in between. Anything to get people not just talking and drinking, but working together. What a way to build collaborations, friendships, and trust. Connecting with humans, not business cards.
Unconvinced? consider which of these groups of people looks like they're learning, being productive, and having fun:
This year I've been to some random (for me) conferences — Science Online, Wikimania, and Strata. Here are some engaging, fun, and inspiring things happening in meetings of those communities:
- Speaker 'office hours' during the breaks so you can find them and ask questions.
- Self-selected topical discussion tables at lunch.
- Actual time for actual discussion after talks (no, really!).
- Cool giveaways: tattoos and stickers, funky notebooks, useful mobile apps, books, scientific toys.
- A chance to sit down and work with others — hackathons, co-writing, idea jams, and so on.
- Engaged, relevant, grounded social media presence, not more marketing.
- An art gallery, including graphics captured during sessions.
- No posters! Those things epitomize the churn of one-way communication.
Come to our experiment!
Clearly there's no shortage of things to try. Converting a session here, a workshop there — it's easy to do something in a sandbox, alongside the traditional. And by 'easy', I mean uncertain, risky and uncomfortable. It will require a new kind of openness. I'm not certain of the outcome, but I am certain that it's worth doing.
On this note, a wonderful thing happened to us recently. We were — and still are — planning an unconference of our own (stay tuned for that). Then, quite unprovoked, Carmen Dumitrescu asked Evan if we'd like to chair a session at the Canada GeoConvention in May. And she invited us to 'do something different'. Perfect timing!
So — mark your calendar! GeoConvention, Calgary, May 2013. Something different.
The photo of the lecture, from the depressing point of view of the speaker, is licensed CC-BY-SA by Flickr user Pierre-Alain Dorange. The one of the unconference is licensed CC-BY-SA-NC by Flickr user aforgrave.
conferences, ideas in Career, Science 
Reader Comments (2)
You bring up some good ideas, some conferences do have those perks. I do disagree with your view on posters. They are a dialog. You get to interrupt the presenter, ask questions, shoot ideas back and forth. It is much more of a discussion. When I presented a poster at AGU last Fall I was talking with people for four hours straight. If I had given a talk I would have gotten much less feedback on my research.
@TSherry — I confess, I am hard on posters. I've only done two or three in my time, and found each to be (a) lots of work and (b) low impact, compared to talks I've done. Maybe I'm a better speaker than posterer (word?).
It sounds like AGU has done something to make posters special — many rave about them. This specialness was missing at SEG last year.
So I capitulate: I can see how a well-attended poster session, with presenters who are present, could be good value for everyone.