In-person-only conferences are so... bleh
Hopefully we never see them again
dbt Coalesce is going on, and I’m just observing things from the very comfortable distance of my own desk at home while seeing commentary scroll by on various social media. No godforsaken trip to the airport, no being surrounded by thousands of complete strangers that I don’t know how to handle, and most importantly, no post-conference disease (not COVID, the typical flu-like exhaustion thing). This sort of experience was almost unheard of a mere three years ago and that fact boggles my mind. The only thing that’s kinda missing is the industry gossip over drinks and being in on the latest buzzwords before the recordings are published.
By just about any definition of the word, I’m considered an extreme introvert. Socializing on the internet, or amongst a tiny group of <5 people is more than enough to fulfil the majority my psychological needs. Obviously I’d hate going to in-person conferences. But despite this, prior to the pandemic starting, I’d at least occasionally go to a conference. The main reason seems to be the same reason that I hear from many people — to meet or catch up with, friends in the industry. In-person networking isn’t as critical in this highly-connected age, but it certainly is valuable.
But the past two years of online-only or hybrid events really started putting into focus just how exhausting the whole conference system is relative to the value I seem to get out of it as a simple attendee. (The math is different if I’m either speaking or helping with the organization.)
The world has actually changed — largely for the better. I couldn’t be happier about our current reality.
What I find interesting is that big in-person conferences were already slowly facing disruption from technology before the pandemic. Slides and talk recordings had already been routinely been posted online for years, which already whittled away at a large part of the appear of attending a conference. In exchange, people watching after the fact lose out on the ability to ask questions at a talk, or bump into a speaker and ask questions then. Considering that out of a room of 100 audience members, only a tiny percentage even bother to ask a question, it’s not a big loss.
So to counteract that, some of the BIG conferences that are run by professional event production companies (and not grassroots industry folk) that charge over $1000 a ticket resorted to things like selling “slightly discounted” tickets to view recordings. Meanwhile, smaller conferences that were mostly run on a volunteer basis would charge significantly less, and generally be much more open to posting recordings up for free after because the “value” of the conference is more in the community aspects than gatekeeping access to talk content.
The pandemic thankfully dropped a bomb on all that.
With two years of essentially no travel, people got creative about replicating as much of the in-person conference experience, without the expensive “in-person” part. Now there are community slacks set up for everyone to interact in real-time — you’re not just restricted to whoever you bump into by the lunch buffet. Without the ridiculous cost of booking a large space to host the event, ticket prices have dropped to effectively nothing — which in turn attracted all sorts of people who had always wanted to come but couldn’t because of time or budget.
The majority of people win! The only people hurt by this disruption are those big-budget highly produced events like O’Reilly’s Strata conference series (which has been canceled indefinitely in favor of online events). Considering the only people who could really afford to go to those big events are people who are being paid to go by an employer, I don’t feel like it’s a huge net loss for the world.
The bar for making an event is the lowest it’s ever been
In the Before Times, conferences often came in either “Super Big Productions” size, or “a bit fancier than a weekly Meetup” size. The conflicting economics of space costs, sponsor expectations, ticket sales, and audience size made doing anything in between very difficult.
But thanks to the pandemic, all the big events had to go online-only for a year or two, and everyone got to experience first-hand what an online-only or hybrid event was like. And by all accounts, most people liked it. The big question that I felt kept people from embracing the online-only concept — answering why would anyone attend “live” when they can watch the recordings later — had be largely answered. People did like watching talks live alongside others, even virtually.
Now, everyone who has the motivation and a tiny budget can create an event and have a reasonable expectation that some people will attend and enjoy it.
I’ve personally created a small conference for a hundred people with a shoestring budget of about $500. It even turned a tiny profit (that went straight into server costs) by selling tickets for $10-15. Normconf actually went so far as to sign up sponsors, and that gave them a significantly bigger budget to do cool things like send out swag to speakers.
I’m excited about this because the separation of budget from having a meaningful event experience means we’re going to be seeing conferences about topics that no one’s imagined before. Desktop publishing is finally coming to events. If you can find 100, 50, even 25 people on the internet who care about something enough to sign up to all go to the same video chat together for a couple of hours, that’s the start of a conference. All it needs then is a bit of organization and suddenly the world will be a better place because there’s more knowledge being shared.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong in the long run and in 10 years we’ll all be cramming ourselves into big conference rooms again… But I honestly hope not.