Talk:Conferences and presentations--why leaders should care
From LLN
- Note - the first four sections here are excerpted from a discussion in the comments on the Walt at Random copy of the December 22, 2008 PLN Highlights post, and appear here by permission.
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Behind the curve? -- Peter Murray 22 December 2008
In light of budget crunches and concerns over environmental impacts, the face-to-face conference seems to be going by the wayside. Just this month, Apple announced that it wasn’t coming to MacWorld conferences after this year. It said:
- Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers.
Perhaps what libraries should be looking for is ways to “reach more people” without having a face-to-face meetings. Conference calls, webcasts, online learning environment, etc., may be where we should be focusing our efforts now with ways to bring the “why do we do them” reasons to the forefront without all of the detriments of the traditional conference.
Going by the wayside? Maybe not -- Walt Crawford 22 December 2008
No, as it happens, I really don’t believe face-to-face conferences are going away. Will there be lower attendance? Possibly. Will there be fewer commercial conferences? Maybe not a terrible thing. Will there be more unconferences and alternative forms appealing to driving-area groups? Yes, I believe so–-and two of the original articles in the cluster deal with unconferences.
But do you really believe ALA, Midwinter, or most of the state library conferences are going to disappear so rapidly that the PLN articles are worthless? Really? Code4Lib filled its registration limit very quickly. 2009 Midwinter preregistration is considerably ahead of 2008.
I’d be delighted to have more “alternatives” articles, but no, I don’t really believe that webcasts, conference calls, etc. will or should wholly replace in-person conferences. At least not any time soon. I believe this cluster provides useful information for at least the next few years and probably longer. If I’m wrong–-well, the wiki hasn’t reached its size limit yet. (Given that MediaWiki powers Wikipedia, I think we have a ways to go.)
Reduced importance -- Peter Murray 23 December 2008
I don’t think face-to-face conferences will be going away in the next few years either, but I think their importance will be dramatically reduced and that Apple’s move is a bellwether of that trend. I remember when Comdex was cancelled a few years back. Four years ago Gartner (in a trade journal article) said, “a ‘perfect’ storm of factors such as tightened travel budgets, declining show profits and the increasing expense of Vegas…combined to cause the show’s decline." Gartner also said that the mainstreaming and splintering of the IT industry made a single show less applicable.
The Code4Lib meeting itself is evidence of “mainstreaming and splintering” in the library community: library technologists (many of whom are not “librarians” and therefore are somewhat distant from the core ALA constituency) moved to fill a pent-up demand. But Code4Lib is more than the meeting--it is a couple dozen people who chat and share expertise daily on IRC, a mailing list for more asynchronous communication, an RSS aggregator that broadcasts the conversation of its members, and a journal that documents some of the polished practices of the library technologist field. (Did I forget anything? Not bad for an ad hoc group.)
Taking the leadership aspect of PLN into account, I’m trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to advocate for an expanded cluster that describes how libraries can take advantage of newer communication means. I’m hard pressed to write a definitive document on the topic, but I’m hoping you can find someone else who can.
I'd love to see an expanded cluster -- Walt Crawford 23 December 2008
I’d love to see an expanded cluster with more alternatives. Every cluster in PLN is open for expansion, and the overview article actually specifically requests new articles–-but I’m not in a position to commission them, and have limited resources to write them myself. Either I find good blog posts or, well, they don’t necessarily get written.
I’ll add some discussion to the overview article (and post portions of these comments on the Talk page) and maybe spin off a Challenge question and/or another article. (As, to be sure, I’m getting ready for Midwinter and Canada’s closest thing to a library megaconference, the OLA SuperConference.)
So here's an opening: Care to add your comments--or submit an article on conference alternatives? (If you're not ready to add a full-fledged note here or a new article, why not participate in the Forum topic?
