Conferences, the last post
Remember when I promised to write one last post on conferences? And remember when I didn’t? Now I’m going to.
Here’s what I said last time:
I believe, more and more strongly as time passes, that the mega-conference and the association conference as currently constituted are on their way out, so all this wrangling over compensation models will eventually become moot.
You’ll notice the weasel words. You didn’t notice the weasel words? “As currently constituted,” I said. And with those weasel words in place, I still believe it.
What do these conferences do? What are they (de facto or de jure) for?
- Provide social networking and reunion opportunities.
- Provide a venue for vendors and (potential) clients to meet-and-greet.
- Provide face-to-face meeting time and space for the association.
- Provide résumé opportunities for those who need them.
- Provide opportunities for idea exchange, professional growth, and learning.
I’m a big old conference nerd. I go to conferences for point 5. I’m the one you see carefully annotating the conference schedule so that I maximize my learning time. I don’t care about the vendor floor, I’m happy to see people but it’s not the highlight of my day, I’m not doing association business (yet), and my résumé’s quite healthy, thanks.
Nerds like me are in a distinct and (I believe) shrinking minority. I went to TXLA. I saw what attendance at sessions was like (keynote aside), compared to the hordes of people on the conference floor or chatting in hallways. Now that I think back, the same was true of ACRL, and from what I hear of ALA, the same is still true there.
What’s more, the Sage on the Stage model is about as tired at conferences as it is in the classroom. The kind of learning more and more librarians need can’t be got from a Sage on the Stage. It’s experiential, which means small groups rather than hotel ballrooms. It’s technology-flavored. It’s many-to-many rather than one-to-many. It runs in clearly-defined themes.
So why are associations spending so much time, effort, and money on speakers lobbed scattershot into conference schedules? Excuse me while I do my best Zero Mostel impression: “TRA-DI-TIOOOOOOOOOON! TRA-DI-TION! (five beats) TRA-DI-TION!”
Okay, it’s not just tradition. Some of it is frankly figleafing. Résumé-padding is one form of figleaf, of course. But so is pretending to go to sessions so you have an excuse to go to conference and hang out with your buddies. C’mon, we all do it. (Except for conference nerds like me, but that is because I am a NERD.)
Think I make this stuff up? Nah. I got an email from a friend yesterday asking me if I’d like to run for office in the state library association. (Being vague as to nature of office for all the obvious reasons.) What’s it entail, I asked. She sent me a fine list. On it: organizing conference stuff. Good librarian that I am, I checked my state association’s conference compensation policy to see if it accords with my personal sense of what’s ethical. It doesn’t. So much for that, then. I told my friend so.
Part of her response: “Or we could just let conferences as we know them die. Could be a good thing - massive savings of time and energy for what one could describe as 3-day class reunions.”
It’s a waste. It really is. And eventually some enterprising association is going to decide that conference-session money is better spent—on almost anything, really. Lobbying. A real website designer. Whatever.
So what will association conferences look like then? Me, I think they’ll split into several pieces. Vendor expos will be vendor expos, and they’ll be cooperative events handled regionally, with profits split among sponsoring associations. (Big ’uns like TXLA will stay more or less as is.) Association business will move online, because it’s dead stupid that it hasn’t already done so.
And the teaching and learning will take place at smaller, tightly-focused venues (when it takes place in meatspace at all, that is; I do expect distance events, properly imagined and managed, to catch on). Immersion. Code4Lib. BarCamp. ACRL Institutes. Et cetera. You’ll notice that there are two basic types of these: classroom-like affairs not unlike preconference sessions, and peers-teaching-peers events. The former style of event pays everyone or no one. The latter pays no one.
I think that’d be a good world, a more honest world, certainly a better world than the one we’ve got for conference nerds like me. It’s a world that will respond faster to what librarians need, because it’ll be attendees (rather than conference committees) deciding how and with whom to group themselves for best learning. Narking on myself here—what the hell do I know about what Wisconsin librarians need to learn at conferences? Not a thing, that’s what. So why guess?
My crystal ball is murky when it isn’t outright broken. Librarianship also has a remarkable capacity to resist good, even necessary, ideas. So maybe the association conference as currently constituted will last out my career.
If it does, it won’t be for intrinsic merit or even interest, however.