Conferences after COVID
Nobody, lying on their deathbed, ever said: “I wish I’d attended more conferences”
COVID’s not going away fast, and we must be prepared for future pandemics, and for a world with lowered use of fossil fuels. Conferences aren’t coming back in their old fashion, at all. What happens next?
I think I’ve spent the equivalent of more than two full years at conferences. Over a thousand nights in hotels. Hundreds of flights and airports and taxis. Lonely dinners. Conferences have been important in my career, and in my life. Literally: I met my wife after I gave a plenary address at a conference 20 years ago — one of the only romantic episodes ever from a telecom technology conference. And I live near a city — San Francisco — where big conferences draw over 100,000 well-heeled attendees, packing hotels and bars and restaurants and streets: Salesforce’s annual event; the biggest medical conference in the world, run by JPMorgan; legal bashes and more.
The last conference I attended was PhotonicsWest, in San Francisco, on the last days of January and the first days of February, as news of COVID’s contagion was itself spreading. I no longer shook hands, and was apprehensive about trading business cards. I collected no tchotchkes. Conference rooms packed for a really good session made me queasy. Rumors were already rife that the sponsors were thinking of backing out of Mobile World Congress, a monster telecom basho held each year in Barcelona. Soon, on 12th February, MWC was indeed cancelled — perhaps the first big conference to fall victim to COVID. Shortly after that, San Francisco itself declared a state of emergency. An online list of cancelled events grew from a few to basically every event, anywhere on earth.
The future of conferences is going to be different
COVID’s not going away fast — we must prepare for months and years of masks and crazy new hygiene regimens. And we must be prepared for future pandemics, and then prepared for a world with lowered use of fossil fuels. Conferences aren’t coming back in their old fashion, at all. So, we now need to design the new world we want, amid new constraints and with new possibilities.
That much is inevitable. The pandemic also, let’s be honest, forces companies to think more carefully about what value they obtain from conferences. And that thinking is what is going to be essential for us to contemplate conferences in the post-COVID world.
Why do people go to conferences? (Apart from non-professional reasons, or getting away from the home or office and appearing to work.) My list:
- To experience things you need to experience in person
- To learn things in an interactive environment, and particularly to learn things you didn’t know you needed to learn
- To expose your products and ideas to new audiences
- To meet people you didn’t know you needed to meet
- To catch up and circulate in your professional milieu
Some of these may be replicated in a digital environment, but not all, and not all will be well replicated. And some of the things we aspire to achieve in conferences may be better accomplished.
Onwards to the post-COVID conference world
How can we re-imagine the world of conferences? How, for example, does scientific research even move forward properly absent the conclaves that mark the passing of the year in progress? Or, how does consumer electronics have a fluid market absent CES? (As my wife likes to say about that meeting: the only thing worse than going to CES is not going to CES.)
How to see things?
Software products or legal thinking or financial models, and many scientific papers: these can be described to remote attendees. Perhaps we don’t have the software-as-a-service tools to enable them adequately, but that’s a technical implementation issue.
But sometimes, you have to see or sense the thing. You cannot look at, for example, the vastness of a wall-sized display screen through a network. Nor gauge the richness of an audio system with great music playing. Taste food. Smell perfumes. Feel cloth. See the livestock. The flowers. Get the entire experience of the outside and inside of a new car.
Nor can you stand accidentally in a coffee line with the CEO of the exact company you want to talk to. Hear a not-great presentation from someone at a small booth and realize: they’ve got an important answer to a burning question.
So here’s what can happen.
For things you have to see, experience: those will come to you. Many more smaller (or vast but distributed) events. Car shows, food, wine, display, audio, etc? Rather than one enormous CES per year, Las Vegas, between western and Chinese New Years: a vast, distributed CES. Or some specialists will travel to the unique conferences. (In the world of display, there are individuals with particularly acute vision, known as ‘eagle eyes’, who will fly anywhere on earth to view and judge a display. Higher visual acuity, more receptors in their retina? Each field will have people whose senses best those of most mortals. They’ll travel to experience the thing.)
For things to have to learn, and people you need to meet: enormously better interactive tools — and 24-hour, immersive experiences. Why be bounded by business hours in one time zone, a four-day, all-the-time conference enables worldwide participation with equal annoyances for all — kids walking in during key presentations, important sessions that start at 2am, all of that and more?
And a recreation of utterly stochastic events. HopIn, it seems, has a random moments feature (boring name: event networking) — you get paired with someone and have a few minutes to decide whether it’s worth connecting outside that random moment … and then it disappears. (Is there someone else, other than HopIn to pay attention to, yet?)
Some things few people will miss. The drudgery of long lines and crowded buffets and overpriced conference food. And the carbon footprint of flying thousands of people to events of uncertain value.
And post-talk questions. That dreaded moment when we hear someone, not asking a germane, incisive question, but instead droning on with a position statement (TL:DR — they think they’re smarter than anyone on the panel). Google internal meetings have a tool for upvoting questions. Where is an online meeting that enables that?
Conferences are critical. They’ve paid a critical role in, among other domains, scientific and technical progress. But the post-COVID conference world will be enormously different. The opportunity to utterly rethink them is vast. It’s too bad that only the COVID crisis has forced that re-think, but here we are. Doing it right will mean bringing information, experiences and connections to people who couldn’t afford the time or expense of flying and hotel travel. And it will mean that, some lucky couple, somewhere, will settle into a long technical session and, as an added bonus, meet their future spouse.
