As you might have noticed, it’s conference season in
academia (the largest one, anyway – smaller flurries around Christmas and
Easter also occur). I was very
restrained, and restricted myself to attending two meetings this summer. That was partly a financial decision –
resources are limited, and if I need to pay part of the costs for going to a
meeting myself I need to have a pretty compelling reason to go – and partly
because Dr Michelle Farrell and I were hosting one of them, so anticipated a
lot of work which would distract from doing actual research. We’ll say more about the science elements of
each conference later, but in this post I wanted to say something about the
differences between a small meeting and a large one.
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| Blurry Twitter pic of the opening session at INTECOL13 (from @Scienceheather used without permission). The hall just about sat 2000 people... the tiny bright things at the front are the people speaking! |
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| View from the speaker's lectern at the small meeting (BEFORE the talk began!) own photo |
attending at least one day, and they came from 11 different countries.
At a small meeting, it’s possible to know everyone by name
by the end of the meeting, and there is only one activity scheduled at any one
time. That means that everyone goes to
the same talks, so shares the same basis for discussion. I made a point of trying to chat with
everyone at least once during a lunch or coffee break, or evening meal, and I
think I just about succeeded. At the
large meeting, it was probably impossible even to see every attendee, since there were usually multiple parallel
sessions of talks spread across up to 19 rooms, and people came and went. Even the ‘plenary’ talks when one big-name
speaker was scheduled to speak in the biggest of rooms weren’t attended by
everyone; I certainly wasn’t the only person reading the title and abstract,
noticing how far from my own areas of interest the talk was, and using that
slot to sleep in a little or to meet with someone to talk science or just to
wander around the exhibits or sit down and digest what I’d heard so far. As the week wore on, some people took
advantage of the padded benches in the common areas outside the lecture rooms
to take naps, and many used the free wifi to check email or otherwise spend
time online. I set myself a modest goal
of talking to one new person each day, since I knew I’d want to spend time with
colleagues who are also friends who I don’t see much of outside of conferences,
and that worked well for me. I never did
really work out the schedule, though...
For the small meeting, we handed out name-badges, the
abstract volume (booklet containing the programme and short summaries of each
talk and poster, provided by the author(s)) was put together by Michelle and
photocopied the week before, and there was also a box of pens for those who
needed a writing implement. The
registration fee also included coffee breaks and lunches. Large meetings cost a lot more than small
meetings, but often much of that cost is related to hiring the venue and venue
staff such as caterers to serve coffee or security people to check badges and
look after luggage. We were all
presented with a nice eco-friendly carrier bag containing an eco-friendly pen
(sadly, these are not chewing resistant, and I bust mine within a few hours of
starting to use it), a couple of advertising fliers and a professionally
printed programme showing all the events and their locations. Abstracts for individual talks and posters
were available on-line or via an ‘app’, but not issued in printed form – given
that there were around 1000 talks and several hundred posters, the choice
between teeny tiny print and weighing everyone down would have been pretty
difficult! There was also a large
exhibition hall containing stands where groups like professional societies,
publishers, equipment manufacturers and software suppliers had displays. In order to attract attention, many of these
displays had Free Things to give away, especially pens (I picked up another
eco-pen with a barrel made of recycled cardboard, and it was falling apart
within an hour. I’m just not good at
pens! My eco-pencil, made from lunch
trays, is working fine). The British
Ecological Society had particularly great freebies, including notebooks, post-it
pads, travel card wallets, badges and even keyring torches, all decorated with
their logo.
In terms of social media, we announced that the conference
was happening to the rest of the department by email the week before (so that
they wouldn’t be too surprised by the group of strangers traipsing from the
Earth Science Lab where we had lectures to the Map Room for lunch or round to the
centrally booked computer room Cohen-107 for a practical session) and the
schedule was shared via a pink-highlighter-adorned notice on my office door
each day. A few tweets mentioned the
conference, but it didn’t have its own hash-tag. INTECOL made much more use of social media, from
the earliest stages of advertising the meeting, with regular bulletins emailed
round a mailing list and the conference advertised via listservs and different
academic societies, to having all the abstracts and the programme (along with
travel information and other useful stuff) available via a free app for mobile
devices, and even using Twitter as the only medium for asking questions in the
plenary sessions with the big-name speakers.
I actually felt rather left out at times, as I don’t currently have a
smart phone, and could have done with one during the day at sessions to keep in
touch rather than just logging in occasionally via my netbook when I had a
table to put it on. I joke that I don’t
have one because I’m a Luddite and my current phone works perfectly well still
so why replace it, but part of the reason is that I am very distractible, and I
worry that I’ll spend far too much time tweeting and emailing and playing Angry
Birds if I have a smart phone.
Both types of conference are enjoyable, and exhausting, and
full of good science and new ideas. Big
conferences are good if you are a bit of an intravert and need quiet time to
recharge your energy, since it’s very easy to find a space in the programme when
you won’t be missed and a place to sit alone.
Big conferences are exciting, there’s no doubt about that, but they can
also be rather overwhelming, and unless your interests are finely focused and
align with one of the major themes of the meeting you can feel like you are
constantly missing out on talks you really want to go to because they clash with
something else in the programme. Small
meetings are intense in a different way, since you spend a lot of time with the
same people – but since they are all nerdily interested in the same scientific
problem, there are always things to talk about.
For me, both are more enjoyable in retrospect, when the hassles of
lugging bags across London on the underground on a hot day or of dealing with
all the little problems such as printing off e-boarding passes for return
flights, booking taxis, and helping people navigate the bizarreness that is British
railway pricing policies have faded into the background, and what you remember
are the good conversations, the exciting new ideas and the sense of being part
of a scientific community.
Picture of a crowded session at INTECOL13 (from Simon Harold (@sid_or_simon)'s twitter feed, used without permission)
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