#lingcomm21

I like conferences, and I've made a lot of friends through them. 

I also like the internet, and I've made a lot of friends through it. 

And yet somehow, as conferences were pivoting to online in 2020, I was finding myself at a lot of online conferences where I wasn't even managing to catch up with my existing friends who I knew were also attending, let alone make new ones. Surely, we could do better. Let's start by taking a step back and thinking about what makes each of these formats great for meeting people. 

The conference format is great not because of the program alone but in the structure of the conference around the program — being in the audience of a talk together means that afterwards everyone knows that everyone else in the room has experienced the same material and it is therefore a relevant topic of conversation. A conference program is not about raw information transmission — frankly, a decent blog post or paper would probably be more efficient and accessible for simple info transfer. Instead, a conference program is about creating a "magic circle" — a structure that brings together for a focused amount of time a group of people who care about the topics in the program, and that provides springboards for conversations within that group.  

This emergent benefit of conferences is easy to overlook because it often happens at the margins, disguised by physical and logistical needs. Grabbing some people from the conference to go out for dinner, running into people from the conference at the hotel breakfast buffet, striking up a conversation in a registration lineup, staying in the conference city a day early or late to meet up with fellow attendees, proposing a meetup on twitter with other people from the conference hashtag — it's so much more than just the official post-plenary reception or networking hour. It took me several years to figure out how to "do" conferences effectively by creating more occasions like these because of how the "third place" aspects of conferences are so often neglected from the point of view of the official scheduling. (Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term "third place" points out that third places are often "shabby" and overlooked.) Not surprising then (disappointing but not surprising) that the social part of conferences is overlooked in the pivot to online. 

But, you could argue, maybe online is inherently unsuited to forming social connections? Wait, but like, hold on a sec. 

The final post sharing our experience of running LingComm21 online is all about planning communication access and is available on the Research Whisperer. This is a piece that  I wrote with Gabrielle Hodge, who attended the conference. We talk about communication access, interpreting, live captions and auto captions. I appreciate that Gab shared her experience as a participant at LingComm as well. 

From the post:

Communication access is about ensuring people can bring their best to the event and for everyone to engage in all directions. We want our academic communities to reflect the same variation in lived experience and expertise as the rest of our lives. Planning for communication access should be the same as planning physical access or catering: you don’t wait until people turn up and tell you they’re hungry to plan catering for an event. Communication access should be built into every event, much like making sure accessible toilets are available, that everyone can get into the building and use facilities with ease and that there’s a range of food, not just egg sandwiches. Here are some common and easy-to-implement communication access options for you to engage with your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues.

You can read the full piece on The Research Whisperer blog.

The LingComm21 conference case study posts

This post is part of a 6 part series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social.

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

Planning accessible online conferences

February 2021: Announcing #LingComm21 and #lingfest

This month, I announced LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-style coordination of independently organized public linguistics events, together with an excellent organizing committee consisting of Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, Laura Bailey, and Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), both to take place in April…

When I started trying to solve the problem of virtual conferences being so antisocial by designing a conference to be online-first from the ground up, I had three main inspirations: a tweet, a blog post, and a book. 

In January 2020, there was a twitter meme that read: "You've been given $10,000 a set of conference rooms, and a weekend. You've been instructed that you must hold "your name"-Con. What do you do? What does the event look like? Are there games? panels? speakers?" 

I posted a reply: 

Gretchen Con is obviously just getting a bunch of people together to nerd out about linguistics, like the fun bits of an academic conference (lots of lightning talks and roundtable discussions and "everyone who wants to talk about x go to this room")

...and then, well, the pandemic happened. We were all pretty distracted. 

But as conferences and events kept switching to virtual through 2020, I was noticing that most of them weren't replicating my favourite parts of conferences, the interactive parts, the parts that I'd wanted to replicate in my extremely hypothetical meme tweet. 

I started experimenting with holding various demo events in proximity chat spaces like Gather.town and Spatial.chat, and ultimately wrote an article for Wired about designing better virtual parties. Researching the article led me to reading a lot about social psychology findings that human conversation size naturally maxes out in fluid, changing configurations of around 4 people, much smaller than a typical Zoom social, and publishing it led me to the excellent book The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, a step-by-step guide to better gatherings primarily in physical space but which has many ideas that can be applied to virtual gatherings as well. 

I began thinking, what if we designed a conference to be virtual from the ground up? What would be different if we conceived of a virtual conference not as a simple vehicle to port the typical conference programming online, but as the chance to take advantage of the core social strengths within the overlap of conference and internet, as I talked about in the previous post — to create a magic circle, where people who share a particular interest get to interact with each other over a defined period of time? 

I came up with three principles of what makes an online conference different from an offline one: 

The fourth post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we designed the virtual space in Gather for LingComm21 to foster interaction and small-group conversation. Here are a few highlights: 

Give people pretexts to spend time in the virtual space. While the session rooms themselves were mostly business, we added fun interactive details to the social spaces. The unexpected hit of the conference was the “magical duck” that dispensed emojis of snacks or dinosaurs, a fork of a Glitch bot by Alison Stevens that was inspired by an “emoji bar” created by Em Lazer-Walker. There were other Glitch bots, as well, largely inspired by the Gather Glitch bots by Janelle Shane, as well as Gather’s default interactive piano and whiteboard objects. Each day we added a new interactive experience or two so there was always something to discover. These “Easter eggs” motivated people to join early or wander around the space to find things, and sometimes served as convenient conversation starters (“have you gotten a snack from the duck yet?”). For one day, the cafe space was transformed into a “cat cafe” that included several images of cats (including a foreground image so that people could sit “under” the cat) as well as a livestream of kittens, which some people “stood around” watching for some time, thus allowing others to run into them organically. There are many great nature livestreams available on YouTube, and we think that they can be a great solution to the “cheese plate problem” of giving people objects of recurring interestingness to interact around. 

It’s about the space, but it’s not about the space. Could we have made the Gather space more aesthetically attractive and with even more interactive Easter eggs? Yes. Would doing so have actually made more people use it, or the existing people gain more utility out of it? Probably not. It’s easy to attribute the success of the conference to the Gather space itself, but we’ve seen beautifully designed Gather spaces languish unused when more attention was paid to spatial design rather than temporal design — i.e., providing more and more elaborate rooms and pixel art rather than coming up with events and occasions and programming as a reason for people to keep coming back. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the architecture is in a community center without a calendar of events that provides reasons for people to drop by the community center regularly (and even a shabby building can be much beloved if it hosts warm and welcoming events), and the same thing is true in a virtual space.

Building elaborate spaces in Gather can be a fun hobby — it appeals to the same parts of our brains that like Lego and Minecraft and The Sims. But if you want other people to actually use your space beyond the initial tour, you need to know where to cut yourself off on the architecture side and direct the bulk of your energy to the people side, prioritizing ease of navigation over esoteric Easter eggs, and especially focusing on events and activities that give people a reason to come and get them actually interacting with each other. Yes, it’s scarier to reach out and invite real living people on the other side of the screen than it is to fuss with virtual furniture solo. But anyone who’s worth being friends with won’t mind if you invite them to your home when it’s still a bit messy, and your digital space doesn’t have to be pixel-perfect, either. In fact, for smaller groups we’ve found that embracing chaos and inviting your guests to help decorate the space with you can be a fun activity!

Read the full post.

The third post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we created the schedule for LingComm21 to integrate socialization and be reasonably timezone-friendly. Here are a few highlights: 

Make the conference a shared experience, not solo homework. When people don’t have to travel for a conference, there’s sometimes a temptation to spread conference events across an entire month, or to assign conference homework of watching talks in advance, which makes it difficult for people to have a shared joint conference experience as an event that’s bounded in time. Pre-recorded talks and/or allowing talks to remain available after the conference may make sense for some conferences, but we’ve observed that watching talks as homework plus a live Q&A part often leads to live Q&A audiences who haven’t watched the talks, making presenters either deliver a short recap of the talk or else suffer in silence, and in any case not accomplishing our goals for this conference of encouraging participants to interact. Instead, we debuted each talk as a live presentation with live breakout groups and Q&A, and recorded only the larger sessions, which were available to attendees for a week following the conference (but not forever, to encourage more candid conversation). Some attendees who were in less convenient time zones reported watching the recorded talks before the next day of programming began, so this limited amount of time shifting helped us give attendees a shared conference experience without creating homework.

Make it possible for people to fit the event into their lives. As a new, fully virtual conference, we expected that it would be difficult to convince people to set aside entire days for this event. Additionally, we were hoping for synchronous participation from people in many areas of the world, and we knew that longer days would make this more challenging. We settled on a schedule of 4 days of 4-hour conference blocks, beginning each day at 20:00 UTC. [...]

Build interpersonal interaction into the experience. We had noticed that in many virtual conference environments, socializing and networking were, at best, easily avoidable add-ons. Because facilitating communication among this community was one of our primary goals, we instead made these central parts of the conference-going experience. In most of our session rooms, people “sat” at tables with others, rather than in rows of chairs. Sessions in these rooms included 20 minutes of panel discussion, 10 minutes of small breakout discussions, where people chatted with others at their tables about questions posed by the session’s panelists, and then 10 minutes of questions to the panel again. These breakout tables were self-chosen, rather than randomly assigned, meaning that people could choose to sit at a table where they already knew someone, choose to keep mixing it up, or even move to a different table midway through a session. 

Read the full post.

I am so excited to share the International Conference on Linguistics Communication, happening online the week of April 19-23, 2021. The conference will be made up of moderated panels and poster presentations about lingcomm projects. 

Conference website: https://lingcomm.org/conference/

Speaker/poster submission: https://lingcomm.org/conference/participate (submissions close March 19, 2021)

Registration: via EventBrite

We’ve kept registration as low as possible, and the plenary workshop stream will be live captioned in English.

If you’re more interested in enjoying good lingcomm than making it, stay tuned for LingFest, coming the lat week of April: https://lingcomm.org/lingfest

From the LingComm21 conference website:

The International Conference on Linguistics Communication (LingComm21) brings together lingcommers from a variety of backgrounds, including linguists who have developed skills in communicating with public audiences and communicators who have developed a “beat” related to language.

Taking advantage of a digital-first format to bring together lingcommers from around the world, LingComm21 is a small, highly interactive conference containing a mix of beginner and advanced panels on specific areas of lingcomm, as well as smaller special sessions emerging from the shared interests of attendees. Tell us which topics you can speak to, and we’ll match you with co-panelists who share your interests.

Confirmed invited speakers (so far):

Kate Burridge, Monash University

Nicole Holliday, University of Pennsylvania

Ben Zimmer, The Wall Street Journal

Megan Figueroa and Carrie Gillon, Vocal Fries

Lane Greene, The Economist

Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Girl

Daniel Midgely, Because Language

Grant Barrett, A Way with Words

Helen Zaltzman, The Allusionist

Kory Stamper, Word by Word

Dates: For much of the world, the conference will run April 19-22, in a single four-hour block each day beginning at UTC 20:00. That’s beginning at 10am in Honolulu, 1pm in Seattle, 4pm in Montreal, 9pm in London, and 10pm in Paris. For those on the leading edge of time zones, the conference will run April 20-23, beginning at 6am in Melbourne and 8am in Auckland.

Platform: The conference will be held in a custom space on Gather, a proximity chat platform which lets participants wander around and chat with in spontaneous small groups between sessions, and which includes a virtual coffeeshop and pub for off-hours and informal meetups.

Organising committee: Laura Bailey, Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, and Gretchen McCulloch make up LingComm21’s steering committee. Elizabeth McCullough is the conference manager.

The fifth post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we budgeted for LingComm21 and what other virtual events might want to take into consideration. Here are a few highlights:

Accessibility costs Although not all possible accessibility needs can be foreseen by conference organizers, and we did have a slot on the registration/participation forms asking about other accessibility requirements, the inaccessibility of audio content is extremely well known and formed part of our planning from the beginning.

Because LingComm21 was conducted primarily in English, and involved an international community that spans many linguistic areas, we decided on live captioning for the event, rather than interpreting for a specific signed language or several signed languages. Captions also provide an ancillary benefit for attendees who are hard of hearing, have auditory processing difficulties, or who speak English as a second language, in addition to providing a written reference for the organizers after the event. We had live captioning for 11 sessions throughout the conference, including all the introductory and plenary sessions. This cost around $5000 USD and constituted the single biggest expense for the LingComm21 conference.

We contacted captioning services for a quote as we were still figuring out the structure of the conference, which allowed us to reduce captioning costs by building in breaks for both the captioner and conference participants, meaning that we did not have to pay a second captioner to work in shifts to cover overly-long sessions (and also providing social benefits for participants as detailed in other posts). Reserving captioners early in the planning stages also allowed us to announce that captioning would be provided from the initial advertisement of the conference, rather than waiting for people to request it or invisibly assume that they were not welcome. Around 10% of participants who did the feedback survey said they used the captions, and the majority of the remaining 90% said that although they didn’t personally use them, they were happy to see them there, even though we didn’t solicit this information. (What can we say, the lingcomm community is pretty great.) 

Read the full post.