Online Conferences Should be Better than In-Person Conferences, Not Worse

... but collectively, we haven't yet figured out how.

Yet!

Helen De Cruz and the 2+1 Experiment

The inspired advocacy of the late (dearly missed) Helen De Cruz convinced the American Philosophical Association to try out what they called the "2+1" model for their three annual conferences: two in-person, one remote, with the remote conference rotating among the three divisions (Eastern, Central, Pacific). The plan was to run the experiment for three years. However, a few months ago, after only two years, the APA canceled the 2+1 plan and is returning to ordinary in-person conferencing, citing low attendance and low attendee satisfaction.

This decision was universally bemoaned in a special session on online conferencing held in tribute to Helen in April, at the last (for the foreseeable future) remote meeting of the APA. (Perhaps ironically, it was one of the best-attended sessions in the conference.)

The speakers (I was one) and attendees celebrated the accessibility of online conferences. Online conferences are easier for people with disabilities that make travel difficult, people for whom travel is a financial burden, people who live far from the conference site, and people whose caretaking duties keep them home. By canceling the 2+1 experiment, the APA once again deprioritized the interests of these groups. A second argument emphasized climate change -- all that jet travel.

Still, I see the APA leadership's point. The large majority of conference-goers find in-person conferences more rewarding. I am among that majority. Sitting on Zoom all day watching remote talks is approximately as appealing as waiting all day in a dentist's office under a blaring TV. I'd much rather just read the papers! Or if I'm watching video, at least let it be one I can speed up, pause, and skip.

For me, most of the value in conferencing comes from the personal interactions before and after the talks, the hallway conversations, the dinners together, the little walks outside when we're skipping sessions. Even the sessions themselves, as delivered talks with Q&A, feel somehow more satisfying when you're actually in the same physical space. No remote conferencing tool has yet replaced all of this. I supported Helen's 2+1 plan on grounds of accessibility, but it did feel like a sacrifice of one important thing for another.

Online Conferences Could and Will Become Much Better, but Only If We Try

But -- and this was the gist of my remarks at the De Cruz session -- comparing online conferences now with what online conferences could become is like looking at Usenet in the 1980s and thinking that nothing much more could become of the internet. Just as few people in the 1980s could have imagined Facebook, Uber, and YouTube, few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish.

So far, there's no real equivalent to running across friends in the hallway and escaping for a coffee down the block. And that exact thing will never be fully duplicated. But other tools encourage one-on-one and small group encounters in online conference applications. In Gathertown, you can move your icon around a virtual space, and if you step close to someone, a shared conversation video window opens. Zoom's breakout rooms enable small groups of attendees in a session to have more personal interactions. No company has quite figured out the right range of tools and interfaces, but I see no reason it couldn't get much better. We have barely begun the experiment.

And the talks themselves... let's be honest. Sitting through a forty-minute talk for a chance to ask one question in a line of ten is not the most appealing or efficient use of an hour. If we're a largish audience confined to a single physical room, maybe that's the best we can do. But the internet could allow much more.

Already Zoom can enrich talks in at least three ways: First, sidebar conversations permit tangents without interrupting the main flow (this could be improved if the conversations were separable and navigable). Second, online resources can be shared: data sets to explore and manipulate, interactive figures, links to other resources, etc. Third, breakout rooms let small groups converse, so that you're not restricted to only listening or asking just one question.

What I want you to imagine is that these features are still the equivalent of the Usenet era. With the right design and engineering, listening to a talk might become a much richer and more active experience, with the audience engaging in parallel while following the speaker. (If you object that this distracts from single-minded focus on the speaker, let me point you toward some informal beeper research I did that suggests that people are primarily attending to the content of a talk only about 25% of the time; further research tends to confirm these initial results.)

As for the hallway meetings, well, the stroll and tete-a-tete over coffee are delightful. But you do have to run into the person or be organized enough to plan ahead. You have to either know each other already or be extraverted enough to approach a stranger. Online conferences might eventually have much better ways of connecting people with mutual interests for one-on-one or small-group conversations.

And if you love walking, as I do, then with good internet connectivity, you could stroll through the park while listening to the talk, keeping your energy up and raising the blood from your calves back into your brain.

I anticipate that eventually, if we give it a good enough try, online conferences will be better overall than in-person conferences, even if not better in every respect -- but only if enough of us try, long enough, and in different ways, with the evolving tools that companies will be inspired to build if we create the market for them.

We have failed to be as good and as visionary as Helen hoped we would be, and as she herself was.

[Helen De Cruz; source]