Web Business Marketing Blog

Many conferences are great communities. But they are also hard work. It appears a pity that all this energy is dispersed after the event, only to come back together at the next edition. Meanwhile, assuming quality papers on relevant research have been developed for the conference, it seems a waste to hide it in printed or CD ROM proceedings, rarely opened, or worse, drown it in a scientific repository among thousands or millions of other papers.

For conference participants, especially those presenting papers, the story is equally sad. After spending all this time to write and review a paper, and develop a presentation, it gets only a casual audience on the 3rd parallel session in day 3.

It’s almost as if conferences are designed to spend 80% of effort on 20% of the potential results. So how could we harvest the remaining 80% when the effort is already spent?

Have conferences become a mere rite of passage for academics - a place to practice presentations or collect paper quota to build a resume?

If conference papers are quality documents, presenting emerging research results, surely there is value in disseminating them beyond session 3 on the 3rd day.

How to turn a conference into a community, which is always on, but only meets occasionally?

1. Publish proceedings in the public domain. And rather than publishing a few 100 papers at once, publish one or few at time. See each paper as a separate campaign. Keep discussion ongoing by having a discussion board for each paper.
2. Repeat conference presentations in the virtual world. It’s not because the paper has been presented once that everyone has seen it. Record selected presentations for 24/7 viewing.
3. Have virtual poster sessions on thematic areas of the conference.
4. Run a blog for pre-conference promotion of the event, live blogging during the event and promoting the findings / outcomes afterwards.
5. Produce podcasts or videocast interviews during the events with experts providing a current view on your sector.

Only imagination and time limits what can be done, provided the right incentives.

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How not to waste all that good conference content. - Home - ~Welcome to the Blackline Blog~

Addendum March 2
Over the past week, I observe a lukewarm response to the idea, at least in my industry sector (energy). I guess one of the reasons is that many conferences are mainly networking events, and do not have that much great content to disseminate. And as for academically oriented conferences, there is little incentive to disseminate a paper beyond a conference. Time will tell how this one pans out.

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