#em lazer-walker

1. An online-first conference can be more niche. A physical conference needs to appeal to a sufficient number of people who are interested in a particular topic, who also live within a sufficient radius and/or have sufficient income/support/visas to make travel reasonable. Many physical conferences that pivoted to online for the pandemic found that their registration numbers increased by 1.5x to 2x, which points to how many people are excluded by physical conference travel. But this also means that an online-first conference can be about a topic that's so niche it wouldn't necessarily have been viable as a standalone physical conference at all, such as something that might have been a small meetup or workshop at a larger conference. 

2. An online-first conference doesn't require as much upfront commitment. Physical conferences need to reserve a venue of a particular size before they even know how many tickets will sell, as well as needing to consider issues like catering and staffing. An online conference can in theory be run much more cheaply and flexibly, and is thus easier for first-time conference-runners (like me) who have a niche idea to make happen. (Though cheaper to run doesn't mean entirely free; we'll see in a later post that livecaptioning, livestreaming, and proximity chat platforms all incur costs, even if one doesn't count the labour of conference organizers.) 

3. An online-first conference can be more innovative. Physical conferences that move online are beholden to the expectations of the attendees from previous years, expectations which may not map particularly well onto an online domain. A new online-first conference can set an entirely new pattern, potentially providing a model for useful features to be added onto other kinds of events as well. 

One of Priya Parker's core ideas in the Art of Gathering is that every gathering needs a purpose. Since online gatherings can support topics that are more niche than physical events, and since I was missing the conversations about linguistics communication that I normally have around the margins of physical conferences (and suspected that other people would be too), I got together a small committee of people to run the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, an online-first conference with the purpose of building a community of people who are doing linguistics communication. 

My hypothesis, which I first tested by recruiting the fantastic organizing team of co-chair Lauren Gawne, committee members Jessi Grieser and Laura Bailey, and conference manager Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), was that there were enough people interested in lingcomm to form a decent-sized small conference, maybe up to 100 people. 

We formed this hypothesis based largely on personal connections: we've all had conversations with people about lingcomm at the larger academic linguistics conferences we've attended, covering various catchment areas as we're based in four different countries. As non-academics, Liz and I had also encountered people interested in lingcomm who didn't typically attend academic conferences, especially in conjunction with scicomm, and from running the LingComm Grants the previous year, Lauren and I knew that announcing things on Lingthusiasm and our own social media was a viable way of reaching budding lingcommers from around the world. 

By building a community of lingcommers at a virtual conference, we hoped to demonstrate two things: 

There is significant interest in lingcomm at a global level, helping lingcomm practitioners learn from each other and feel less isolated 

Effective community-building through online conferences is possible, and this conference and surrounding materials (such as this series of blog posts!) can serve as resources for people with other interests who want to create online events for other communities  

The way that we proposed to accomplish this purpose was inspired by both the Art of Gathering, as I've already mentioned, and an extremely good blog post by Em Lazer-Walker, Using game design to make virtual events more social, which contains a description of conferences as a magic circle, as well as this memorable application of the sociology of friendship to conference design:  

friendships are formed through repeated spontaneous interactions over time.

This model reinforces some design decisions I've already explained: if you want spontaneous interactions, that seemingly requires a more spatial chat model than a giant Discord server where everybody is always in the same chat rooms at the same time.

From there, adding game-like and playful activities to the space can encourage these moments of spontaneous interaction to happen more frequently.

Similarly, The Art of Gathering described how Parker built community at a conference where attendees from different groups were encountering each other for the first time by seating audience members at small group tables and then encouraging them to get up and move to a different table after each talk. Regular mixing promoted not just befriending the few people that attendees happened to sit next to at the beginning, but a broader sense of community as a whole. 

Accomplishing our community-building goal for LingComm21 thus required two key ingredients: first, a conference platform that let attendees participate in self-directed, small-group conversations with a variety of different people, and second, a conference schedule that encouraged people to actually have these small-group conversations (and bond about our topic of interest in particular). 

Here's a preview of the end: judging from people's responses on social media and our exit survey, we succeeded at our goals of building community around lingcomm and creating a model conference. 

in a way this is really obvious, but wow, virtual conferences are SO much better when they're organized and attended by people who believe that virtual conferences can be good

#LingComm21 was hands-down the best digital conference experience I’ve had; this thread does a great job explaining why

#LingComm21 has been an amazing conference so far, and while everyone has been sharing screenshots of the amazing digital space the organisation team has created for us, I also want to reflect on why this works so well for me and how our next online conferences can look like [thread]

In the following posts, collaboratively written with organizing committee members Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, we’ll walk through the design ingredients that we used to create this experience of community both on the scheduling side and on the platform side. 

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts during upcoming weeks, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out. 

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events