Conferences? What are they good for?

September 22, 2006 · 7 Comments

Andy Allan highlighted a couple of posts about the value of conferences from Alan Williamson and Stephen Moretti. The main thrust of their comments focused on two bones of contention:

short sessions
wifi distractions

On the first point they noted that sessions at the conference had been cut from 55 minutes to 50 and then to 40, which had to include 10 minutes for Q&A. To me that is absolutely ridiculous! I criticized CFUNITED 2005 for having 50 minute sessions (including Q&A) and was one of the people who persuaded Teratech to switch to full 60 minute sessions (the 50 minute slots were mostly chosen so sessions ran on the hour, I think). You cannot get deep enough into a topic to give a worthwhile level of detail in just 40 minutes, in my opinion, let alone O'Reilly's 30 minutes. On the second point, they were concerned that attendees just don't seem to pay attention to speakers when they are connected and working on email, IM etc. I've occasionally been guilty of this too and I have to be honest and say that I wish conferences would only provide wifi in the expo hall and other public areas and keep it out of the sessions themselves. If you need to read your email that badly, don't go to a session - you're taking up a seat and you're being rude to the speaker. I don't agree with their conclusion that the greatest value of conferences is the networking outside the sessions (although that is a great benefit). I got quite a bit out of some of the sessions at CFUNITED last year (and I got a lot out of the sessions at cf.Objective() last year).

View count: 172

Tags: cfobjective · coldfusion

7 responses so far ↓

1 Stephen Moretti // Sep 23, 2006 at 1:34 AM

Hi Sean,

Thanks for your links and comments.
I'm glad to see that you agree with the issue of people not being respectful to a speaker by using their laptops for email etc. through session.

I'm not the world's most confident speaker, but I do alright when I know that I am having a worthwhile discourse with the audience. If people did this kind of thing to me, then that would throw my confidence and my concentration.

While I know we perhaps over emphasise the benefit of conference networking, I don't think the conclusion is that this is the only benefit. I guess what we're trying to come up with is a way to make conferences more interactive, to use the networking as a way to get people more involved in the sessions and less likely abuse the facilities and the speakers.

Lets face it, some people do just go to conference for a bit of a jolly and to make contacts. Some of the session aren't necessarily a help to everyone, particularly with a much smaller conference like Scotch on the Rocks (http://www.scottishcfug.com/go/scotch2005/), where there is only one track, so why not try and get everyone more involved?
2 Mark Fuqua // Sep 23, 2006 at 6:43 AM

I think conferences would be much better if they had tracks that, if followed from start to finish, amounted to a full day, or two day, or three day class. Of course you would still be free to pick and choose sessions, but if you wanted to learn about Flex or OO you could. Of course, this would require paid speakers, as it would be impossible to coordinate between different "invited" speakers, maybe those tracks could be premium.

I certainly think it would be much more attractive to many people that way.
3 ntunney // Sep 23, 2006 at 8:27 AM

I have to agree 100%. As a presenter, even if you walked into a session knowing the current skill level of each attendee you still would be hard pressed to convey useful information in only 30 minutes. As for the wifi, you make a great point of only having access in the main hall.
4 Nathan Dintenfass // Sep 23, 2006 at 8:52 AM

But, without WiFi in the sessions how will people do real-time blogging of the event? ;)
5 Rob Gonda // Sep 23, 2006 at 9:11 AM

agreed! I suggested that some sessions should be 90 minutes at CFUnited; some topics need that much to provide the level of detail expected by the attendees.
6 Cary Gordon // Sep 23, 2006 at 4:06 PM

Personally, I like wifi in the sessions, particularly when there is code involved and it is available online.

It was particularly fun at CFUnited to follow along with Steve Rittler's FarCry preso. Steve is rocketman, and I would have never remembered his best tips otherwise.
7 Jeff Houser // Sep 24, 2006 at 7:44 AM

I don't learn in a classroom / lecture type of setting. I learn best by doing. The best I can hope for is walking away from a conference with a list of "things to learn" on my own time.

In my case, networking is the only benefit of a conference; historically I've gotten much more out local networking events than far-away conferences, which makes it harder to justify the cost.

An Architect's View

CFML, Clojure, Software Design, Frameworks and more...