Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
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 internet is great because it allows people to find others who share their impossibly niche interests, dramatically reducing barriers to access, especially in terms of geography, cost, and findability. Although the internet doesn't remove all barriers (timezones, language, and access to devices are still relevant, for example), we now take it for granted that you can easily find other people talking about a book that's now out of print or stumble down a rabbit hole of an obscure musical genre that could never have gotten a mainstream record deal. People are willing to be real with each other in ways that matter: I have longtime internet friends where I know quite a few details about their mental health status even though I don't know, for example, how tall they are. Marvelling at the capacity for the internet to connect people with niche interests or secret feelings across geographical barriers is so utterly mundane now that it makes me sound like a nineties tech utopianist to even lay it out. But that doesn't mean it's not still real.
With two such promising ingredients, it almost seems like the combination of online + conference should be better than an offline conference. What went so spectacularly wrong? And it's not just one lackluster event — why is an enjoyable online conference so difficult across the board?
The problem is that in a physical conference, the social side comes essentially for free. Sure, there are things that organizers can do to enhance it, like providing food on site, designating ample breaks and social hours, choosing venues with well-positioned common areas to run into people and a good neighbourhood density of offsite food options, and communicating clearly about ancillary digital spaces like hashtags. But I've been to conferences that do none of these things (ahem, especially academic ones), and while it does make for an event that's unfriendly for first-timers, once you know a few people and a few conference-management tips, you can still hack the conference into a reasonable social experience. After all, you can still run into people in the lobby, hang back after a talk to chat with someone, or grab a few people to go to lunch with.
Physical events come with decades and centuries of social infrastructure disguised as practical necessity and conference ritual that organizers have never really had to think about as social. Organizers put coffeebreaks in the schedule because every other conference they've been to has coffeebreaks and because of a vague assumption that people need caffeine, without considering the social benefits of giving people a reason to move around and shared objects to strike up conversations about. Imagine if every conference organizer also had to take on the architecture and interior design and urban planning of the conference space, and we can understand why the pivot to online conferences has gotten off to a rough start.
The reason why virtual conferences are antisocial is that conference organizers aren't used to thinking of the social side as a core part of their jobs, because they didn't have to care about it as much offline. (It's not just conferences, by the way — this post from danah boyd makes many similar points about knitting together a healthy social fabric among students during online teaching rather than just having them hear from instructors in isolation, and I've also been greatly inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, which is about the principles that can make social gatherings of all genres effective and even transformative, and which I'd strongly encourage reading whether you're planning on hosting a conference or a birthday party. I'm just focusing on conferences here for simplicity.)
So if we accept the premise that conference organizers have a social responsibility to their attendees, not just an informational responsibility to them, and that this responsibility is both more challenging and more important for online conferences, we're now left with a second question: how is this social responsibility to be accomplished?
In the next post I'll talk about how I figured out a structure for a better online conference, the ideas from other people that I was inspired by, and the organizational team that put together a model online-first conference called LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, which we hope you can draw inspiration from.
Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts on subsequent Mondays, 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
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Designing online conferences for building community: The case of #LingComm21
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:
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
In other posts we discuss the importance of creating a meaningful, functional, and accessible conference experience. Running an online conference or similar-scale event is not free of cost. In this post we want to bring some transparency to the costs of organising an online conference. Access to skilled volunteer labour and funding will be different for everyone, and we will try to avoid making presumptions about what kind of budget you have, but we discuss costs, revenue and some of our specific approach to balancing the budget. People are used to getting things for free on the internet, and online conferences are much, much more financially accessible than physical events, but for a good conference to be run well, things just cost money. As with many things, there is a certain amount of exchanging time for money or money for time that can be traded off depending on which one your organizational team has more of, but ultimately some of each is necessary: even if you hand-code every piece of software yourself (we do not recommend this), there are still server and bandwidth costs, and even if you delegate the entire running of the conference to paid assistants (we also do not recommend this), there will still be decisions that can only be made by the organizer(s).
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.
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
The Future of Virtual Conferencing: Revolutionizing Communication
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Unveiling the Best Virtual Conference Platforms in Canada
Virtual conferences have emerged as the go-to method for enterprises throughout Canada to engage with their audiences in an era characterized by digital transformation. These systems provide a versatile and interesting method to hold conferences, seminars, and workshops by providing seamless online experiences that cut through geographic boundaries. In order to satisfy their unique objectives, Canadian firms must select the best platform as the demand for virtual conferencing solutions increases. In this article, we’ll examine the top ten virtual conferencing platforms in Canada, each of which has special features and functionalities to help make meetings a smashing success.
