Rules for Conferences (2019)
milan.cvitkovic.net
milan.cvitkovic.net
Conference rules/terms/bylaws that are longer than a Life Insurance contract are also a personal red flag.
Personally I think it's better to focus on conferences that are smaller and more niche and don't have the baggage that comes with getting big and famous. Any time spent on politics is time not spend on actual research discussion
And the 5 minutes talk 17 min discussion could work, but it really depends on the company. If head of e. g. darpa gives instead of a 1h keynote a 15 min teaser and then all 1000 participants can start discussing, it might not really work (as other situations as well).
For a speaker to aim for presenting for 25% of the time and fielding questions for the remaining 75% strikes me as lazy or a dodge in case you have no idea how to effectively present your information.
Totally agree with you on the recorded talks, BTW!
My personal corollary to that: when you're preparing a talk, focus less on trying to get all your findings across and more on what questions you want the audience to ask you. The least interesting talks are those that are unfocused and overwhelm the audience with a firehose of information. The most engaging talks are those that guide the audience to ask interesting questions.
100% agree. I gauge my success as a speaker by the quality of questions I get after a talk. :)
> Don’t attend any talk that’s being recorded
I know myself. I've tried watching those back but it never happens. At best one or two talks if I'm particularly curious about one thing and there's no info about it elsewhere.
Which makes me think talks may just not be the best form. I guess I like them for the combination of entertainment while getting new info.
> You’ll get all the same info in 10% the time by skipping through the video later
That's the problem with video, though: it's almost impossible to skim. I'd be curious if someone quizzed you on those talks after watching them in real-time versus with skipping. Sure, 10% and "all the same info" are both hyperboles and are not to be taken literally, but managing 80% of the info in double that time (20%) would surprise me.
> Caveat: if attending the talk will let you meet the speaker (usually it won’t)
What conferences do you go to where the speaker is locked away after the talk? This confuses me. Or do you mean the line will be too long anyway and there is no point trying?
This isn't particularly difficult. If you skip the pleasantries at the start and end of a talk and use a playback rate of 4x, you'll more or less get that 20% duration. 4x is quite understandable (once you're used to it) given how slowly people giving talks tend to talk. Though if a talk is really dense in terms of content, you might have to go slower just to give your brain a chance to digest the information. Most tech talks aren't that dense, however.
They are best when the panel encourages the audience to participate, and have interesting people sitting at the table. These may not be jargonauts, but people that don't intimidate folks for asking questions, and speak in the vernacular. It helps if the folks at the table have good interpersonal chemistry.
One of my favorite sessions (that I attended -not spoke at), was at a MacHack conference (yeah...old), given by a couple of guys from the Apple "Blue Meanies" team. They were almost like a comedy duo, and gave great information, in a relaxing manner.
MacHack was great. It was a tremendous opportunity to interact directly with Apple geeks.
The standard Apple "One Guy/Gal With Xcode on Presentation Mode" talks are great fodder for after-conference review, but B O R I N G to attend. The production quality is usually great, but I never seem to get much out of the one I attend. I have to review it, in order to understand it.
bad advice, I meet the best people at talks I find interesting. There’s no better feeling than going to an obscure topic and finding the room packed.
If it's a big conference and the speaker is from a no-name or I don't recognize them, I expect the talk was accepted because it's actually an interesting talk and not just coming from a big name company or a sponsor. I also get a lot more out of non-technical talks.
At the academic ones, it's mostly cliques of grad students from the same lab, and they maybe socialize with grad students from labs where their advisors used to be. I've never seen much serendipity happening.
The tendency is even stronger at tech meetups and conferences. People use them to meet up with friends they rarely see, or they just come with friends from work.
As few connections as I've made on technical Discords, I've made fewer at conferences. Go if you have people to go with, just watch the videos otherwise.
It seems like there is so much information presented so rapidly that I end up forgetting most of it pretty quickly and am only able to focus on a few things. I don't drink or really party so that doesn't really do anything for me.
It seems that if I want to learn about something the best way for me is to sit down and read about it for a while. Not to mention half of it seems to be marketing drivel depending on the conference.
So HN what am I missing? How do I make a conference useful?
That's it - that's the entirety of it.
The dirty secret is conferences would be much better if they simply had no sessions scheduled at all, and locked everyone in the ballroom for the entire day.
(To be honest we do have a few short talks and an agenda to guide the discussions, but these are mostly requirements of the funding that we've found)
I've been to conferences where I simply forgot to attend any talks at all, simply because I was too busy/having fun chatting to people.
A lot of the more "professional" conferences have stands just for paying sponsors though, and usually not a lot of them. They tend to be a lot less lively than open source conferences and the like which allow any ol' open source project to set up a stand. I like stands because they're a good conversation starter, and in many ways also like a presentation yet a lot more informal.
Unfortunately all of that died with COVID in my area, and hasn't really started back up since :-(
When I used to go to more academic conferences, I mostly went to smaller tight-knit ones where most people knew each other. I found that much more interesting than the big ones with thousands of people which definitely feel more anonymous and take way more work to meet people in, and end up being closer to what you'd get from attending something online.
Tldr, try going to a ~100 person niche conference in your specific field, or at least one that has tracks that emulate that
Where does one find conferences that small? Everything I've seen (is|seems to be) for large-ish conferences? Large-ish being defined as the ones with the "anonymous feel".