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August 21, 2005
The value of conference attendence
I ran across this on the SocialTwister blog, a great social informatics blog, in their post the 80-20 Rule of Conferences. Now while I am probably one of those people who would quibble about the percentages, especially for academic conference, I do agree with the over all discussion here...conferences are for networking. I do think you need to attend sessions at conferences...and as a student attend conferences where you are not presenting. So keep all of that in mind as you read this post and the one to which it links. I'll come back to conferences a bit later in the series.
p.s. If you are interested in social informatics, CMC, or related disciplines you should be planning to attend the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Chicago, October 5-9, 2005.
For some time now I've been slowly telling people about the underlying value of conferences and workshops. In having that conversation, I'll often relate to people my 80-20 Rule. It goes something like this:Conferences are:It's hard for anyone to really argue with this, though they sometimes want to tweak the numbers. The folks that have a vested interest in the content are willing to pump up the value of the presentations. The people that are shy also tend to align with this thinking. The extroverts don't even go to the sessions!
80% people (the networking)
20% presentations (the actual content)
Generalizations aside, meeting people face to face is not just desirable, it's necessary for most things that are going to really stick (IMHO). Fortunately, I'm not alone in this thinking. I came across this link from Dave Taylor (via Business Opportunities Weblog):
The Critical Business Value of Attending Conferences
I definitely recommend you give it a read.
Posted by prolurkr at August 21, 2005 07:03 PM
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Posted by: Dave Taylor at August 22, 2005 10:49 PM
Personally I too find that style of presentation to be less then entrancing, though I have also learned very useful facts from presentations where I had to work to concentrate because I was not enjoying the delivery. Likewise the reading of the paper in the presentation is often discipline driven. Not to say that disciplinary expectations cannot be changed rather just that they change slowly and to fit in one must at least pay homage to the expectation.
I can remember going to a conference since I became a Ph.D. student – and this is a very large international conference – where the bulk of the presentations I saw were done with slide projectors. It had been years since I had listened to someone present backed by that periodic “THUNK” of slides changing. It definitely distracted from the presentation…but poorly constructed PowerPoint presentations can be equally distracting.
I try to get past the trapping of the show part of conference presentations to get the heart of it…the research and conclusions drawn. That is what I need for take always…the rest is window dressing.
Posted by: Lois at August 22, 2005 11:01 PM
Actually, having attended various (boring!) academic conferences where presenters stood in front of the room and read monotonically from their written papers, my experience is that an academic conference is about 1% presentations, 99% networking.