3 ms·

> It's not really a replacement for attending a conference live but it's a mostly inexpensive (money and time) way to get exposed to a lot of the formal content

by reshlo 3y ago

> It's not really a replacement for attending a conference live but it's a mostly inexpensive (money and time) way to get exposed to a lot of the formal content of a conference. This is something that has troubled me about in-person conferences for a while: they are inegalitarian. If they’re not really about the content, the only people who get the true benefit are those already privileged enough to be able to attend. That means the purpose of in-person conferences is to compound inequalities. We should not have them.

xg15 3y ago
If you follow that thinking through though, it would mean that almost any "real world" interaction would further inequality, and that any kind of significant exchange of knowledge should be restricted to online spaces - so effectively going back to pandemic living, at least as far as meetups and conferences are concerned. You could certainly do that but it's not a world that I'd personally would want to live in. Maybe an alternative would be "distributed" events like e.g. Global Game Jam: Have not one venue but multiple, in different countries or "visa spaces", then link them all up online. Also more focus on "hybrid" conferences: Make online attendance less second-class by e.g. allowing remote speakers with an in-venue audience, and local speakers with a partially remote audience; also let the remote audience ask questions and participate in discussions via zoom etc.
- ghaff 3y ago
  In general, I agree. I also found that "let the remote audience ask questions and participate in discussions via zoom etc." pretty much didn't work except for some smaller events. Yes, they could load questions into a queue which is something but, then, Q&A in a large conference session isn't great under the best of circumstances. "More a comment than a question" :-/
grotorea 3y ago
But doesn't society also benefit from both the formal and informal part of the conference? Is it worth levelling down?
zmgsabst 3y ago
This is a race to the bottom. We shouldn’t throw out something beneficial because it’s not perfect — and doing so has already drastically degraded our societies. Edit: Personal anecdote — smaller academic conferences being cheap means that you actually get a mix of people. Most of the cost is travel and lodging ($150 for a week conference ticket). So you get a few more corporate people at them than you’d expect. You can argue it’s classist, and it is, but society will always have a class system (eg, check out Russia and China at any point in time) — our question should then be “what is the most egalitarian system of classes we can have?” I would suggest you get that with two ideas: - your class is the log of your net worth - there are affordable tickets to the structures of cultural power, eg conferences I know that soil ecology and human sociology aren’t identical, but it might be worth considering why we don’t want to till soil too often [1] and why people might therefore prefer systems where there’s some cultural continuity — even at the expense of perfect meritocracy. [1] - https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/frequent-tillage-and-its-impact-soil-quality https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/frequent-ti...

by reshlo 3y ago

xg15 3y ago

If you follow that thinking through though, it would mean that almost any "real world" interaction would further inequality, and that any kind of significant exchange of knowledge should be restricted to online spaces - so effectively going back to pandemic living, at least as far as meetups and conferences are concerned. You could certainly do that but it's not a world that I'd personally would want to live in. Maybe an alternative would be "distributed" events like e.g. Global Game Jam: Have not one venue but multiple, in different countries or "visa spaces", then link them all up online. Also more focus on "hybrid" conferences: Make online attendance less second-class by e.g. allowing remote speakers with an in-venue audience, and local speakers with a partially remote audience; also let the remote audience ask questions and participate in discussions via zoom etc.

ghaff 3y ago
In general, I agree. I also found that "let the remote audience ask questions and participate in discussions via zoom etc." pretty much didn't work except for some smaller events. Yes, they could load questions into a queue which is something but, then, Q&A in a large conference session isn't great under the best of circumstances. "More a comment than a question" :-/

grotorea 3y ago

But doesn't society also benefit from both the formal and informal part of the conference? Is it worth levelling down?

zmgsabst 3y ago

This is a race to the bottom. We shouldn’t throw out something beneficial because it’s not perfect — and doing so has already drastically degraded our societies. Edit: Personal anecdote — smaller academic conferences being cheap means that you actually get a mix of people. Most of the cost is travel and lodging ($150 for a week conference ticket). So you get a few more corporate people at them than you’d expect. You can argue it’s classist, and it is, but society will always have a class system (eg, check out Russia and China at any point in time) — our question should then be “what is the most egalitarian system of classes we can have?” I would suggest you get that with two ideas: - your class is the log of your net worth - there are affordable tickets to the structures of cultural power, eg conferences I know that soil ecology and human sociology aren’t identical, but it might be worth considering why we don’t want to till soil too often [1] and why people might therefore prefer systems where there’s some cultural continuity — even at the expense of perfect meritocracy. [1] - https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/frequent-tillage-and-its-impact-soil-quality https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/frequent-ti...