Dave Waters, Paetoro Consulting UK Ltd

What we look for and enjoy in conferences is a very personal thing, make no mistake. We are all different. Many of us have been “forced” by microbe mayhem into remote conferencing activities over 2020, and I am sure we have all come out of that experience with a mix of impressions.  It has at times been both a delightful discovery and a strained struggle. What follows is therefore just some offerings on what I think we can do better.  It is not a prescription, it’s just my view. I’d be interested to know how many of these thoughts are shared and how many aren’t. That exercise is frequently a surprise – the dynamics of how we each learn is so diverse. 

For starters, I think the first thing we need to do is understand that so many of our habits of conferencing have been tied in the past to the restrictions and benefits of a venue. More importantly perhaps from an organiser's point of view, the costs of a venue. I think we find ourselves in the situation of having lost all the benefits of a physical venue, but still, through force of habit, hanging on to the restrictions. It is now possible to let those go.

The mega conference

This is a definite genre – but let’s face it – the attraction of these has in the past been:

• They are an easy sell for potential attendees to employers – they carry big reputation and kudos, which means for organisers that good attendance is usually assured.
• They have been an opportunity to get away, go somewhere nice, and meets lots of people – not just at the conference, but in after-conference socialising.
• They remove us physically from any distraction.
• To an organiser – they are a captive audience – there are all sorts of stalls and sales that can go on “on the side” as a consequence. 

These are some of the benefits that drive the demand for the big mega-conference. Are they still valid in a remote conferencing world? No.  

The restrictions of a physical conference are that:

• Venues cost money – they can’t go on indefinitely.  Lots of content therefore has to be temporally crammed into a short period of time to maximise profit or minimise loss.
• They take a huge amount of time and effort to prepare. Food, accommodation. Transportation, health & safety. Etc., etc.

We can, unshackled by the constraints of a venue, think differently. For a start – twin/triple track sessions. There is no longer a need for them. They are always one of the biggest frustrations at a big conference. If we can do it all remotely there is no need. We are no longer forced by costs of the venue to squeeze everything into a certain time frame, so why bother?  

If this breaks things out into a longer period of time, then do so. Better yet, just make the various themes separate conferences. I suspect many of us prefer the village feel to the mega-city anyway – we don’t have to have everything bundled and scheduled together if we have lost the benefit of being physically together. That was the main driver for it. It’s gone the moment we go remote. Maybe smaller strongly themed conferences beat big mega-ones.

This is particularly true given we are increasingly doing all of this at home. The incentive to spend several days at home tied to a computer event when the fridge is next door and the park a short walk away, the dog or kids at your heels, and the emails loading new work keep trundling in on screen two, is much less. Lots of short strongly themed events – are maybe better than one big-long event trying to hit everything. 

Get the delivery logistics right

Nobody, no institution is perfect, and we all make allowances. We know it’s harder remotely and we cut organisers slack, so this isn’t a criticism intended to shame. However, we are also fickle creatures, and the remote medium is a far less forgiving one than in person, in the flesh. 

At a remote event, you do not have a captive audience. You are engaging with the digital generation. You have seconds to engage. We are not sitting in a lecture hall sort of obliged to stay even if our interest is fading. People can leave in an instant without even having to let you know they have. It is far, far easier to leave, and leave they will, unless they are engaged quickly.  Remember, the kids, the fridge, the dog, the park, those emails – they are there, staring them in the face, on the window in the background, or on monitor two, competing with you. 

That means, that as far as possible, the logistics of delivery have to be good.  Dead time will lead to dead audience. Faffing around with IT issues, connections failing, audio not working. There will always be a limit to what can be achieved, and there will always be gremlins appearing to challenge us as event organisers. It is about planning though.  Dry runs. Getting those connections with each contributor clear and tested before the event. Not trusting it will be alright on the day. 100% success is never guaranteed but failing to aim for that should not be an option.

Organisers – you don’t have to pay for a venue and associated catering anymore, and so frankly if you can’t pay for the time to do this rigorous IT preparation, then don’t hold an event. It is critical in a remote setting. One or two episodes we can all forgive, but a constant repetition of such things and there won’t be repeat custom.  Your IT protocols with contributors have to be disciplined, insistent and as far as possible seamless. Contributors have to know that failure to comply with these protocols ahead of time precludes participation. 

There will be those times when connections are lost. Have a backup plan. Have multiple content options that fill in for those speakers who hit an irretrievable IT snag. Especially at a big event. 

Pace

It is always a real need at any event to keep the pace up. This is never easy for contributors or organisers and is just as important in a physical conference as a remote one. However, again, in a remote event setting, failure here isn’t a few momentarily bored faces, it is departed faces.

That said, as a technical person, I also love detail. So, what are the options? Well digitally, there is the option to have a pre-recorded video presentation and digital abstracts available. In a physical venue, we have to force everyone to watch one speaker, or one of the parallel session speakers. There is no such constraint in a digital conference - people can sidle off and dive in deeper, or not, at their discretion, instantly if they choose to. 

One of the best conference events I attended recently was almost a speed dating affair. There was that personal live interaction with the speakers, but they had five minutes to sell it to you. In half a day there was a huge amount of material delivered – and heck, it was exciting.   You knew that in five minutes something else new was going to come up. A fast-paced chain of discovery.  And if there was one that didn’t quite float the boat for our own personal interest, well then you knew something else was about to come up in five minutes, and you wouldn’t have to wait long for the less interesting bit to pass.  That excitement of knowing something new was soon, kept us there.  As for detail – the option, if we want, to dip into a longer pre-recorded presentation and written abstract after the short intro, meeting that need.   

That perhaps provides less option for questions and interaction in that situation – but that brings me to the next topic.

Questions

Side chat or Q&A windows – they are helpful. They are a risk too, but the benefits outweigh the risks. Seeing the questions other people have is great stimulation – and actually it may be empowering a lot more questions from people that would not normally ask them in a physical setting. That's good. That has its frustrations too maybe, but if we can’t stand that heat, we can stay out of the kitchen.

I think questioning formats though, are one of those examples where we are letting habits of the old physical historical conferences drive what we do, and we shouldn’t. If we imagine that format of a fast-paced five-minute “dip-in-the-water” for each speaker, with more detailed pre-recorded presentations subsequently available at attendee choice - then there is the option to be different with questions. It’s true, that the short soundbite style presentation is a difficult genre for us all to rise to, on what are often difficult and technically involved topics. Nobody said success was easy though. Work it.  Having seen it work well a few times, it is a great skill to get up our sleeves.

Historically we are used to having a Q&A session after every presentation. If there are no questions from the audience at a physical conference, typically the panel, or chairman feels obliged to ask a few token questions they have “in their pocket” just in case, almost as a comfort blanket or exercise in politeness to the speaker. I say stop this practice remotely – it is just fluff. Don’t feel obliged to have questions asked. If there are no questions from the audience, don’t drag it out, rather move on instantly. 

There are many reasons why this can occur and it’s no shame. That rapid move-on may cause problems of timetabling, but this can be averted by simply having a joint Q&A session timetabled after a cluster of 5 or 6 short presentation synopses rather than after each talk. If there are detailed presentations to examine, perhaps those Q&A sessions can be next day affairs. There may be issues with that but suffice to say there are all sorts of permutations to consider, and contrived questions to pad time in a remote event – should be ditched – it’s not what attendees paid for.

Always though, in preparation for that rare speaker who takes two minutes rather than twenty in a fifteen minute timetabled session (bless them – give ‘em a medal), have some pre-prepared back up content that is engaging. A relevant case study perhaps. A direction to some recent papers to come out on the topic. An ad from a sponsor. Something. All it takes is a bit of thought and a bit of imagination. All that time organisers used to have to put into arranging venues and catering and accommodation – now they can spend it on arranging this. Again, conference organisers - online dead time is your worst enemy. Fear it. Prepare plans B through to Z.

Let it be

Tragic as COVID-19 has been and still is and will continue to be – it has forced many new ways of doing things. Travel, and remote working have been morphed into new beasts that seem increasingly unlikely to ever flip back totally, to what they once were. 

Remote conferencing is a new and different genre, yet I don’t think we have quite realised the extent to which this is true. We can stop trying to match it to what used to happen, and “let it be”. We are free to stop holding onto the straightjackets of physical conferences and be different. When we are organising events, getting into the habit of rigorously asking the questions:

• Why actually are we doing it this way – do we have to anymore?
• Is this going to create issues in a remote setting?
• Is there a better way it can be done remotely?

In summary, I feel myself landing on a few personal conclusions. Insomuch as physical conferences may begin again if vaccines are successful, all well and good, the things true of old, remain true. However, if remote conferencing remains a fixture of our learning world in the future:

My personal take specifically in that remote conferencing context:

• Big mega-conferences are a dinosaur better replaced by more, smaller, stronger themed/niche conferences.
• If as a conference organiser, you can’t devote the time and effort into IT logistics and disciplined protocols, including backup content for when things go wrong, then don’t do it.
• Pace is critical and dead-time/fluff-padding is your worst enemy. The audience is not captive, therefore far less forgiving. It can and will walk.
• Given our attention spans in the presence of multiple distractions – which inevitably is what remote conferencing involves, then short and sharp and fast is best.
• Detail can be provided in various digital forms as backup.
• Questions can and should be treated very differently.

Feel free to differ. When we feel such things ourselves it is always hard to know how general they are. Rather than fill out 30 conference/webinar feedback forms though, I thought I would put this out there more widely and more pre-emptively.

Be free…

It’s hard, and let’s give ourselves a pat on the back – having perceived what has been achieved in conference-land amongst challenges that are truly formidable. If the COVID-19 pandemic had happened twenty, even ten years ago, the scale of digital countermeasures that would have been possible would have been far-far less. 

The conference world has by and large risen to the challenge.  We've done all right, all told. Perhaps though there are one or two socks that need pulling up, or more importantly, even a decision to throw shoes and socks away altogether and run newly barefoot in the surf along conference beach.  We have a new genre at our disposal, let's feel its sand between our digital toes.

KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: Paetoro Consulting