On Conferences
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I wish I had time to help run a conference (again). I have a lot of opinions.
I’d love to run a small conference where the rule was, everyone had to present in some form (30m presentations or shorter show and tell style talks). This would obviously cap the event at a small number of attendees but I think it would level the field in an interesting way.
For a slightly larger conference, I’d institute a no laptops / no phones policy in the conference hall. If you want to go back to your hotel room and take a call that’s fine, just don’t bring it to the hall. The hall is for socializing with the other speakers and guests. I know this might annoy people who like to take notes on a laptop/iPad but pencil and paper should suffice this time.
It’s summer conference season and I’m getting a little burnt out of the standard full time STAGE –> AUDIENCE format. We are in an age of YouTube, blogs, Twitter, newsletters, FaceTime, iMessage – and we don’t need to wait for the yearly conference to express our fresh ideas, we are doing it all the time.
In my opinion, a conference’s main goal is about using presentations to spark the fire of discussion amongst the attendees. Sadly many of the conferences I find myself at don’t do this and instead the attendees spend 90% of there time sitting silently in a dark room, everyone looking forward, no communication, no talking.
Some basic tips for conference organizers:
- Make sure to plan lots of socializing time in-between talks, like for every 1 hour of talks and then there should be 1 hour of socializing.
- Consider limiting individual talks to 30 minutes and have a section for shorter lightning talks. The goal is to get as many ideas out there as possible. Different ideas will stick with different people. The more the better.
- Use circular tables. Yes this requires more floor space but it keeps people facing each other during breaks and naturally let’s other people break in to a conversation.
- Make people change their seat every so often. A forced lottery seems harsh but you could also use topical tables, like one table is a “spaces” table and another is a “tabs”.
Notable conference behaviors I’ve seen and enjoyed.
- Release Notes Conference breaks people into teams for dinners around town at different style restaurants.
- CocoaLove conference embraced its hosting city with morning walking tours and site seeing.
- I like the concept of pre-conference workshops. I think it allows those who are new to a platform to get a lot of hands on time before experiencing talks that usually don’t cater to them.
- I loved the feel of old school MacHack. It was a 24-hour, 3-day conference where the opening keynote was at midnight. We took over the hotel lobby and worked on our hacks for the contest / presentation at the end. In between coding, in side rooms, people gave talks of all shapes and sizes. There was a movie night where we bought out a full theater and watched as a group. It was a real community building event.
I’d love to hear others stories/thoughts. Email me: mike@mikezornek.com or post a blog post on your own site.
About the Author. Mike Zornek is a developer and teacher focusing on product design and development with a heavy focus on Elixir and LiveView. In between his projects, Mike helps other teams through consulting. During off hours, he enjoyed watching Phillies baseball and playing relaxing video games.
Hopefully, you found interest in my scribbles. If you have commentary or a response, I'd love to hear it.