Recently turned down an invitation to attend a conference.
If you are organizing conferences in Washington you must realize a few things:
1. The main reason people attend any conference is to meet people. Interesting people, useful people, old friends. This is the actual reason people are coming to your conference. Everything else is ancillary to this.
2. Your programming can either aid attendees in their aim or impede them.
Programming 8:00 to 8:00 panels and speeches is impeding their aim. It is difficult to meet anyone sitting quietly in a conference hall while you all listen to some guy on a stage talk.
2. Conferences do not in fact have to be this way—especially if you are capping attendance or not opening up attendance to the general public.
For example, the very best conference I have attended structures the entire thing as a series of small discussion groups between 5-8 people.
That is at the extreme end. There are many less extreme variations on the the general theme, however.
How much time do you schedule for in between sessions where attendees can meet and talk? Is the event space conducive for relaxed, small group or 1-on-1 discussion?
Do you have open-ended breakout sessions where attendees have the chance to exchange views? Smaller Q&As with prominent attendees?
3. A secondary reason to attend a conference is to listen to what an important person has to say.
But in the age of YouTube this is mostly moot; of the conference is filming proceedings, then you can watch what that person has to say from home.
The exception are closed door conferences under some sort of Chatham house rules. In this case attending had added value on Youtube—but even here conference organizers need to communicate to said important people the importance of being frank and honest.
If off the record remarks are just echoes of old talking points then again, there is no value added.
3. This is all especially true when the conference is located in a place where many of the people invited to attend the conference live. I do not live in Washington but I have enough friends there that it is not difficult for me to stay over night.
In this situation what incentive do I have to actually register for the conference? I can watch the talks on YouTube and I can network with the people the conference brings to town without registering for anything.
Yes, this is parasitical on your efforts but you are trying to waste my time.
4. As a final note—with the exception of a few very carefully prepared presentations, I think most attendees at conferences learn more from small group discussions/breakouts than they do from formal speeches (much less formal moderated panels) .
This was my takeaway from a conference I recently attended. I asked 6 or so people who attended what they benefited most from during the conference and discovered that almost everyone said their favorite part were the breakout group discussions.
This is just a better way to do most conferences. Have a few scene setting speeches and addresses to set the tone of the event and create common grist for the communal mill, then arrange the rest of the conference to maximize active participation over passive listening.
Ok 2 final thoughts:
If you must have a panel, make it a panel between two people who disagree. explicitly stage it as something like a debate. Most people are more interested in conflict than concord. Most movements are better off when they can surface tensions constructively.
This is by far the best way to do things but is not practical for most organizations unless the conference is small. Splitting attendees up into dozens of balanced discussion groups requires a large logistical tail.
One passable, overhead substitute for this is to allow attendees to do the sorting themselves by having them create the discussions/panels/debates themselves at the conference itself.
^low overhead
This style of conference is usually called an “unconference” and it has its charms.
The strength of this sort of conference really rests on the strength of its attendees.
But that is IMHO an asset—it forces you change your question from “what is the best panel we can put together” to “ what attendees would add the most to this conference?”
The only other way to solve this problem is to create a conference that the big men of prestige find value in attending *themselves.*
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