The Future of the Conference

As you know, I am here at Perimeter Institute for the upcoming workshop on the Laws of Nature: Their Nature and Knowability. Every time I lift my bag on a scale at a check-in counter I am wondering if there will come a time when, instead of stepping on a plane, we will meet in cyberspace.

The Past

The classical conference in academia is still omnipresent. You go, you sit and listen to a dozen talks a day, you smalltalk over coffee and cheap cookies and try to get to know some people at the "social event," typically a reception with buffet or a conference dinner. Also typical is that the average participants pays a horrendously high fee that covers the VIP guests airfare and four star hotel. But that's okay because most of the participants have a travel grant for exactly this purpose.

That might sound a bit dull, and it frankly sometimes is, but there are a lot of good reasons both to organize and go to a conference.

On the participant's side: Most notably, conferences are useful to obtain or keep an overview on the research going on in one's field. An overview both on the what and on the who. It is possible to do that by other means, but a conference is an especially efficient way to do it, in particular if you're a newcomer. In contrast to reading a review, you can go and talk to the people who work on similar stuff like you and face-to-face communication is still the best way to exchange information. You might learn about some unfinished work and find a new collaborator. You might get to hear a talk by some of the more well-known people in the field that might be unlikely to pass by your own institution. And last but not least, you have the opportunity to communicate your own research, get feedback and advice.

On the organizer's side: Organizing a conference takes a lot of work and time. One doesn't make money with a scientific conference - in fact the first steps will be trying to find sponsors. Reasons for organizing a conference are most notably to advance the research in one's own field. It's to bring together and support the community, to spread ideas, to foster the formation of collaborations. Conferences are also frequently used to advertise the institution where they take place, which most often is one of the main sponsors. As an organizer one often has, to some extend, the possibility to select speakers that one is interested in hearing or meeting. And then there is the communication of the research field's relevance beyond the own community. Many conferences will have a public lecture and will have some media coverage, at least in the news magazine of the university where it takes place.

There are a few variations to the conference scheme. A workshop for example will typically have fewer participants and fewer talks, and these talks will be more specialized and leave more room for discussion. The large conferences will often separate talks into plenary talks and parallel session. Sometimes they will dump people into a poster session.

The Present

During the last years, with the spread of social networking tools and the continuing improvements in information technologies, one could start to see some modifications of the standard scheme. To begin with, it is nowadays possible to let a speaker deliver a talk by video link and it is similarly possible to let people participate by streaming video. I have been to a few conferences were talks were given by video and they typically are not very well attended. I'm not entirely sure why. It's like people think "Oh, he wont really be here." Or maybe it's that, not so surprisingly, these talks typically imply a lot of technical fiddling and are fault-prone. That however will improve the more often it happens.

Another quite obvious change that is now so common one easily takes it for granted, is that most conferences have the slides of talks online and in many cases even a recording. This is so omnipresent that indeed most conferences no longer publish proceedings. I find this extremely useful because I don't have to take notes and write down a reference on the speaker's slide. I can just go and look it up later.

Then there are the changes in format. I wrote previously that I was at the SciBar Camp in Toronto and later at the SciFoo Camp in California. In this case the schedule is not set before the start of the meeting, but assembled by self-organization and participant's interests upon arrival which is greatly aided if the participants had in advance a possibility to exchange their interests online. This spontaneous self-assembly has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it's a more flexible format that expresses the participants' rather than the organizers' interests, is more lively and interactive. Disadvantage is that most of the sessions will be pretty much unprepared. Since I actually prefer listening to thought-through arguments instead of improvised babble, I am not too much in favor of this mode of organization. I think that for scientific purposes, a combination of both, the old-fashioned scheduled talks and some more flexible sessions would be more suitable.

And then of course there is the use of social networking tools, like Twitter, Friendfeed and blogging or just setting up a networking site specifically dedicated to the event. Whether or not that works well depends crucially on how many people make use of it. But if it works well, this can serve a lot of purposes. One is clearly the communication to the public. But besides this it also improves the exchange between the participants. In particular if you are at a large conference you might not actually know who is interested in similar topics like you or who you might want to talk to in the coffee break. If a conference wants to make good use of Web2.0 tools first thing they should do is to aggregate the participants' feeds. It is somewhat ironic, but you might not actually know that the person sitting next to you is writing a blog you read frequently. And installations like a Tweetwall for example (a screen displaying tweets by participants, see picture) add a completely new layer to the discussions that can take place at a meeting and can greatly improve information exchange and facilitate networking.

It is interesting to see how more and more conference organizers are making use of these possibilities. It depends of course a lot on the technical support that they have. For example I read the other day on Resonaances that the International Conference on High Energy Physics 2010 has launched an official blog and recruited some bloggers to cover the event. How cool is that? One should add that of course these things have been done since years in some communities that are especially dedicated to advancing these changes in networking, blogging, outreach and information technology. And Perimeter Institute's outreach efforts have been playing around with all these possibilities since years, for example with the recent Quantum2Cosmos Festival. Point I'm trying to make is that the use of these tools is now slowly spreading and becoming more common.

The Future?

So what's next? NatureNetworks organizes conferences that are life-streamed to Second Life. Will this become the conference of the future? I think it is very well possible. I don't think it is very likely that conferences will become entirely decoupled from physical reality in the sense that we exclusively meet online. But it will become increasingly more common to attend a "real" conference "virtually" if one cannot be there in person for one or the other reason, may that be lack of funding or illness.

I also think that conferences will obtain several more virtual layers in the soon future. For example, I imagine that you go to a talk and while you are there can "log in" to the respective website, and so could people who are not physically there but following online. You could then for example skip back and forth in the slides as you wish or ask your colleague in the second row what he thinks about what the speaker just said. I think that this happens to some extend today by people sending emails, but it could become much better aggregated. I am not sure however that such a complex environment as SecondLife is necessary for these purposes. Though it has of course the advantage that the technology is already in place.

As to the increased flexibility in format. There is a quite obvious hurdle to having an academic conference that has not a program online a month ahead and neatly scheduled speakers: Many people can only justify their participation and receive a reimbursement for their expenses when they are giving a talk. This is a typical example where requiring "accountability" can be misguided (see also) and hinders improvements. However, I think that this problem will resolve by itself once funding agencies notice that there are other means to document one's participation in an event than being listed on the program. Basically, all they really want to know is that you didn't just spend the week on the beach at their expenses. But taking part in online discussions or blogging can serve a similar purpose.

Bottomline

Real change is happening and I think we'll see more of it!