Conference economics
Some people make a major effort to observe Memorial Day in a fittingly sober and dignified fashion. Some fire up the barbecue.
Me, I ponder the economics of speaking at conferences and for continuing education. (Wearing my code4libcon T-shirt, too. That’s not precisely irony, but it’s certainly something.) In the interests of full bias disclosure, I’m currently implicated in Meredith’s conference ponderings.
Suppliers of speaking labor—and let’s not be coy, here; speaking is work—come in two basic stripes: gratis and paid. Of the paid variety, there’s the expenses-only kind, and the honorarium kind—and even the honorarium kind divides into those who make their living from speaking (quite the rara avis in libraryland, though I know of one or two) and those who treat it as a nice sideline.
The gratis speaker divides into two stripes also: the altruist and the whuffie-ist. The whuffie-ist tends to be an academic librarian (thus, I believe, much grumbling about how conferences never have enough public-librarian speakers) under the gun as regards retention and/or tenure. Solo vendors drumming up business, librarians on the job trail, and folks hoping to move into the paid-speaker ranks are also whuffie-ists.
A final type of speaker is the clueless altruist, who has more than enough whuffie to move into paid-speaker ranks but doesn’t realize it. These speakers can be taken advantage of by the savvy conference organizer; they exist because the economics of speaking is treated a lot like the economics of journal-bundle pricing—kept under wraps as much as possible, and for much the same reasons. (So that those getting shafted don’t find out, of course. What, you didn’t realize that?)
This taxonomy crosses with another: the invited-speaker model versus the academic-speaker model (in which would-be speakers apply and have their applications reviewed by conference organizers). The academic-speaker model tends a bit less toward the star system because of its obvious substitutability factor, and it’s obviously toward the whuffie end of the scale of rewards. There’s crossover, though. I’ve had a conference organizer beg me to submit tutorial proposals for review, dangling a (not-expense-covering) honorarium in front of my face (and yep, I bit at the bait).
All of this, mind you, presumes a conference model in which lots of people come to a place to listen to a (relatively) few people. It presumes a hierarchy of speaking desirability, and it presumes at least on the “paid” level that one speaker can’t easily be substituted for another.
Indeed, insofar as clueless altruists create a substitute good for paid speakers, paid speakers resent them. But they don’t, interestingly, resent the conference organizers who recruit them—not openly, at least. They’ve got an obvious economic motive not to speak up. (In point of fact, I’ve heard some pretty sharp words spoken about certain conferences and their organizers, but almost exclusively in private. It must have taken Jeff Jarvis and Jenny quite a bit of guts to speak up about getting shafted by conferences.)
In fact, conference organizers don’t have much to fear from clueless altruists who wise up, either. Two possibilities: either the formerly-clueless altruist moves into the paid-speaker ranks (with the conferencer organizer’s active connivance), which keeps any resentment under wraps, or the formerly-clueless altruist was primarily valuable by virtue of low cost, at which point the conference organizer simply moves on to the next clueless altruist.
Getting to the point after much blathering—I think this model is destabilizing somewhat, thanks in part but not entirely to Internet-based educational and conference services. I don’t know what exactly will shake out of it, because there’s a lot of inertia in the system, especially among academic librarians who really, really need the whuffie.
One trend I notice is speakers (of any stripe) taking a back seat to social interaction at conferences. It’s the rare conference-goer who doesn’t schedule at least some conference time to get together with old and new friends. Even “hackfests” like Access’s are implicated; they’re peer-production workshops instead of the speaker-led tutorials and hands-on training I’m used to at conferences.
The larger the conference, the more pronounced the out-of-band socializing effect… but that may merely be because smaller conferences (like DASER) have already noticed and are feeding the trend with single-track programming and lots of “down-time” in between. This doesn’t devalue the conference necessarily (just restructures it into more of a gathering and less of a classroom), but it does reduce the economic value of paid speakers.
Conferences on the DASER model are reputedly hard to put together, because the fixed costs aren’t spread over as large a number of people. Consider, however, the success of small and largely impromptu code4libcon, and ponder the future. Speaking for myself, I shall actively avoid large conferences henceforth. You wouldn’t catch me dead at ALA Annual or Midwinter, even if ALA and I managed to patch up our differences. I won’t go to Computers in Libraries or ACRL again; once is enough for that style of madhouse. Sure, there’s lots more career-whuffie in a name conference, but in my experience mammoth size tends to dilute the quality of presentations (even by otherwise smart and reliable people) rather than increase it. Small is beautiful, if you ask me, and I’ll take whatever whuffie hits I have to in order to avoid the mammoths.
And then there’s that internet thing. Folks can pick up a lot of whuffie fast with a good blog, though the jury’s still out on whether that dilutes the pool of paid speakers with new blood or provides whuffie-substitutes for speaking. I mean, Peter Suber isn’t a librarian, but if he were, wouldn’t you consider Open Access News worth serious career whuffie? It’s the number-one source in the field! And consider Charles W. Bailey Jr., too, not that he needs any more career whuffie. (Speaking versus print/pixel publication is a whole ’nother issue, and for now I don’t want to go there. It’s all whuffie to me.)
But whuffie is only the beginning of the internet’s disruption of the standard conference model. We’re starting to see some experiments in online conference-like-things. Thus far, organizers of more typical conferences don’t have much to worry about. All-asynchronous conferences like HigherEdBlogCon aren’t rousing huge amounts of interest. They’re easy to blow off for busy professionals, and they don’t offer (yet) the easy out-of-band socializing. Doing synchronous online events is a good deal more difficult, especially if the interaction is to be camera-based rather than text-based. Still… it can be done, and it will surely become easier and cheaper than it now is.
It’s far too early to tell how far these conferences and educational opportunities will take us. So far, the only folks working them are pretty hardcore altruists like Meredith and a vendor or two scenting opportunity. Those vendors need to be careful, though. Leaving real-time public criticism and suicidal vendor meltdowns aside (and everybody who needs to knows what I’m talking about, and not mentioning it specifically leaves me blissfully idiot-vendor threat-proof), most of what now serves as conference-ware can be whomped up out of open-source bits and pieces, and the missing bits—even the synchronous-cam bits—are mostly Coming Soon.
It’s even possible that online conferences will supplement rather than supplant typical conferences. Like it or not, there’s a class divide in librarianship between people who can afford to do the jetset thing (or, like me, live in a place that conferences tend to come to) and people who can’t. Maybe the online conferences will simply lower the bar for low-paid professionals, creating new whuffie and paid-speaking opportunities at the same time. Consider, for example, that savings in conference logistics like hotel conference rooms (and no, I’m sorry, you cannot convince me that putting on an online conference is anywhere near as expensive as dealing with hotels) could go toward paid speakers while leaving plenty for lowered attendance fees. Not a bad thing all ’round.
But honestly, I wouldn’t count on it. Another trend I see is conference archiving, everything from slideshows to podcasts to conference blogging to streamed video. It’s going to be a lot harder for paid speakers on the library conference circuit to reuse material going forward, I think. And if the peer-to-peer conference catches on in a big way, we’ll end up with just a few superstar speakers—or a lot of people talking to each other and paying considerably less for the privilege. Or possibly both.
Me, I’m playing the whuffie game because I have to. I had a paid-speaker nibble a few months ago, but nary a peep since, so I’m assuming it came to naught. It honestly feels pretty absurd to think of myself as a paid speaker, less than a year into librarianship and given my laissez-faire approach to putting talks together. (I’m a decent speaker, if I do say so myself, but because good-enough speaking comes fairly naturally to me, I haven’t spent as much effort improving my skills as I perhaps ought to.)
Even given career-whuffie issues, though, I’m willing to dive into the new world, perhaps because I was a clueless altruist not so long ago and I never really expected to get paid for sharing what I know at conferences in the first place! I’d really rather do small conferences, peer-to-peer conferences, and online conferences even if none of them ever pays me a dime. I’d rather be a valued peer than a clueless altruist, or even a speaker for pay, though of course that last is so unlikely I can safely be accused of sour grapes.
Honestly, I’ll come out even or ahead anyway, given the likely trajectory of my career. What it costs to go to a conference these days!