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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

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Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

I like conferences, and I've made a lot of friends through them.

I also like the internet, and I've made a lot of friends through it.

And yet somehow, as conferences were pivoting to online in 2020, I was finding myself at a lot of online conferences where I wasn't even managing to catch up with my existing friends who I knew were also attending, let alone make new ones. Surely, we could do better. Let's start by taking a step back and thinking about what makes each of these formats great for meeting people.

The conference format is great not because of the program alone but in the structure of the conference around the program — being in the audience of a talk together means that afterwards everyone knows that everyone else in the room has experienced the same material and it is therefore a relevant topic of conversation. A conference program is not about raw information transmission — frankly, a decent blog post or paper would probably be more efficient and accessible for simple info transfer. Instead, a conference program is about creating a "magic circle" — a structure that brings together for a focused amount of time a group of people who care about the topics in the program, and that provides springboards for conversations within that group.

This emergent benefit of conferences is easy to overlook because it often happens at the margins, disguised by physical and logistical needs. Grabbing some people from the conference to go out for dinner, running into people from the conference at the hotel breakfast buffet, striking up a conversation in a registration lineup, staying in the conference city a day early or late to meet up with fellow attendees, proposing a meetup on twitter with other people from the conference hashtag — it's so much more than just the official post-plenary reception or networking hour. It took me several years to figure out how to "do" conferences effectively by creating more occasions like these because of how the "third place" aspects of conferences are so often neglected from the point of view of the official scheduling. (Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term "third place" points out that third places are often "shabby" and overlooked.) Not surprising then (disappointing but not surprising) that the social part of conferences is overlooked in the pivot to online.

But, you could argue, maybe online is inherently unsuited to forming social connections? Wait, but like, hold on a sec.

The internet is great because it allows people to find others who share their impossibly niche interests, dramatically reducing barriers to access, especially in terms of geography, cost, and findability. Although the internet doesn't remove all barriers (timezones, language, and access to devices are still relevant, for example), we now take it for granted that you can easily find other people talking about a book that's now out of print or stumble down a rabbit hole of an obscure musical genre that could never have gotten a mainstream record deal. People are willing to be real with each other in ways that matter: I have longtime internet friends where I know quite a few details about their mental health status even though I don't know, for example, how tall they are. Marvelling at the capacity for the internet to connect people with niche interests or secret feelings across geographical barriers is so utterly mundane now that it makes me sound like a nineties tech utopianist to even lay it out. But that doesn't mean it's not still real.

With two such promising ingredients, it almost seems like the combination of online + conference should be better than an offline conference. What went so spectacularly wrong? And it's not just one lackluster event — why is an enjoyable online conference so difficult across the board?

The problem is that in a physical conference, the social side comes essentially for free. Sure, there are things that organizers can do to enhance it, like providing food on site, designating ample breaks and social hours, choosing venues with well-positioned common areas to run into people and a good neighbourhood density of offsite food options, and communicating clearly about ancillary digital spaces like hashtags. But I've been to conferences that do none of these things (ahem, especially academic ones), and while it does make for an event that's unfriendly for first-timers, once you know a few people and a few conference-management tips, you can still hack the conference into a reasonable social experience. After all, you can still run into people in the lobby, hang back after a talk to chat with someone, or grab a few people to go to lunch with.

Physical events come with decades and centuries of social infrastructure disguised as practical necessity and conference ritual that organizers have never really had to think about as social. Organizers put coffeebreaks in the schedule because every other conference they've been to has coffeebreaks and because of a vague assumption that people need caffeine, without considering the social benefits of giving people a reason to move around and shared objects to strike up conversations about. Imagine if every conference organizer also had to take on the architecture and interior design and urban planning of the conference space, and we can understand why the pivot to online conferences has gotten off to a rough start.

The reason why virtual conferences are antisocial is that conference organizers aren't used to thinking of the social side as a core part of their jobs, because they didn't have to care about it as much offline. (It's not just conferences, by the way — this post from danah boyd makes many similar points about knitting together a healthy social fabric among students during online teaching rather than just having them hear from instructors in isolation, and I've also been greatly inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, which is about the principles that can make social gatherings of all genres effective and even transformative, and which I'd strongly encourage reading whether you're planning on hosting a conference or a birthday party. I'm just focusing on conferences here for simplicity.)

So if we accept the premise that conference organizers have a social responsibility to their attendees, not just an informational responsibility to them, and that this responsibility is both more challenging and more important for online conferences, we're now left with a second question: how is this social responsibility to be accomplished?

In the next post I'll talk about how I figured out a structure for a better online conference, the ideas from other people that I was inspired by, and the organizational team that put together a model online-first conference called LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, which we hope you can draw inspiration from.

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts on subsequent Mondays, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

#lingcomm21 #lingcomm21 case study #conferences #community #lingcomm #conference #the art of gathering #online conferences #virtual conferences #meta #advice

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superlinguo · 2 years

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Planning communication access for online conferences: A Research Whisperer post about LingComm21

The final post sharing our experience of running LingComm21 online is all about planning communication access and is available on the Research Whisperer. This is a piece that I wrote with Gabrielle Hodge, who attended the conference. We talk about communication access, interpreting, live captions and auto captions. I appreciate that Gab shared her experience as a participant at LingComm as well.

From the post:

Communication access is about ensuring people can bring their best to the event and for everyone to engage in all directions. We want our academic communities to reflect the same variation in lived experience and expertise as the rest of our lives. Planning for communication access should be the same as planning physical access or catering: you don’t wait until people turn up and tell you they’re hungry to plan catering for an event. Communication access should be built into every event, much like making sure accessible toilets are available, that everyone can get into the building and use facilities with ease and that there’s a range of food, not just egg sandwiches. Here are some common and easy-to-implement communication access options for you to engage with your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues.

You can read the full piece on The Research Whisperer blog.

The LingComm21 conference case study posts

This post is part of a 6 part series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

#linguistics #lingcomm #lingcomm21 #language #conference #online conference #access #communication #interpreting #captions #gather

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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

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Designing online conferences for building community: The case of #LingComm21

When I started trying to solve the problem of virtual conferences being so antisocial by designing a conference to be online-first from the ground up, I had three main inspirations: a tweet, a blog post, and a book.

In January 2020, there was a twitter meme that read: "You've been given $10,000 a set of conference rooms, and a weekend. You've been instructed that you must hold "your name"-Con. What do you do? What does the event look like? Are there games? panels? speakers?"

I posted a reply:

Gretchen Con is obviously just getting a bunch of people together to nerd out about linguistics, like the fun bits of an academic conference (lots of lightning talks and roundtable discussions and "everyone who wants to talk about x go to this room")

...and then, well, the pandemic happened. We were all pretty distracted.

But as conferences and events kept switching to virtual through 2020, I was noticing that most of them weren't replicating my favourite parts of conferences, the interactive parts, the parts that I'd wanted to replicate in my extremely hypothetical meme tweet.

I started experimenting with holding various demo events in proximity chat spaces like Gather.town and Spatial.chat, and ultimately wrote an article for Wired about designing better virtual parties. Researching the article led me to reading a lot about social psychology findings that human conversation size naturally maxes out in fluid, changing configurations of around 4 people, much smaller than a typical Zoom social, and publishing it led me to the excellent book The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, a step-by-step guide to better gatherings primarily in physical space but which has many ideas that can be applied to virtual gatherings as well.

I began thinking, what if we designed a conference to be virtual from the ground up? What would be different if we conceived of a virtual conference not as a simple vehicle to port the typical conference programming online, but as the chance to take advantage of the core social strengths within the overlap of conference and internet, as I talked about in the previous post — to create a magic circle, where people who share a particular interest get to interact with each other over a defined period of time?

I came up with three principles of what makes an online conference different from an offline one:

1. An online-first conference can be more niche. A physical conference needs to appeal to a sufficient number of people who are interested in a particular topic, who also live within a sufficient radius and/or have sufficient income/support/visas to make travel reasonable. Many physical conferences that pivoted to online for the pandemic found that their registration numbers increased by 1.5x to 2x, which points to how many people are excluded by physical conference travel. But this also means that an online-first conference can be about a topic that's so niche it wouldn't necessarily have been viable as a standalone physical conference at all, such as something that might have been a small meetup or workshop at a larger conference.

2. An online-first conference doesn't require as much upfront commitment. Physical conferences need to reserve a venue of a particular size before they even know how many tickets will sell, as well as needing to consider issues like catering and staffing. An online conference can in theory be run much more cheaply and flexibly, and is thus easier for first-time conference-runners (like me) who have a niche idea to make happen. (Though cheaper to run doesn't mean entirely free; we'll see in a later post that livecaptioning, livestreaming, and proximity chat platforms all incur costs, even if one doesn't count the labour of conference organizers.)

3. An online-first conference can be more innovative. Physical conferences that move online are beholden to the expectations of the attendees from previous years, expectations which may not map particularly well onto an online domain. A new online-first conference can set an entirely new pattern, potentially providing a model for useful features to be added onto other kinds of events as well.

One of Priya Parker's core ideas in the Art of Gathering is that every gathering needs a purpose. Since online gatherings can support topics that are more niche than physical events, and since I was missing the conversations about linguistics communication that I normally have around the margins of physical conferences (and suspected that other people would be too), I got together a small committee of people to run the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, an online-first conference with the purpose of building a community of people who are doing linguistics communication.

My hypothesis, which I first tested by recruiting the fantastic organizing team of co-chair Lauren Gawne, committee members Jessi Grieser and Laura Bailey, and conference manager Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), was that there were enough people interested in lingcomm to form a decent-sized small conference, maybe up to 100 people.

We formed this hypothesis based largely on personal connections: we've all had conversations with people about lingcomm at the larger academic linguistics conferences we've attended, covering various catchment areas as we're based in four different countries. As non-academics, Liz and I had also encountered people interested in lingcomm who didn't typically attend academic conferences, especially in conjunction with scicomm, and from running the LingComm Grants the previous year, Lauren and I knew that announcing things on Lingthusiasm and our own social media was a viable way of reaching budding lingcommers from around the world.

By building a community of lingcommers at a virtual conference, we hoped to demonstrate two things:

There is significant interest in lingcomm at a global level, helping lingcomm practitioners learn from each other and feel less isolated

Effective community-building through online conferences is possible, and this conference and surrounding materials (such as this series of blog posts!) can serve as resources for people with other interests who want to create online events for other communities

The way that we proposed to accomplish this purpose was inspired by both the Art of Gathering, as I've already mentioned, and an extremely good blog post by Em Lazer-Walker, Using game design to make virtual events more social, which contains a description of conferences as a magic circle, as well as this memorable application of the sociology of friendship to conference design:

friendships are formed through repeated spontaneous interactions over time.

This model reinforces some design decisions I've already explained: if you want spontaneous interactions, that seemingly requires a more spatial chat model than a giant Discord server where everybody is always in the same chat rooms at the same time.

From there, adding game-like and playful activities to the space can encourage these moments of spontaneous interaction to happen more frequently.

Similarly, The Art of Gathering described how Parker built community at a conference where attendees from different groups were encountering each other for the first time by seating audience members at small group tables and then encouraging them to get up and move to a different table after each talk. Regular mixing promoted not just befriending the few people that attendees happened to sit next to at the beginning, but a broader sense of community as a whole.

Accomplishing our community-building goal for LingComm21 thus required two key ingredients: first, a conference platform that let attendees participate in self-directed, small-group conversations with a variety of different people, and second, a conference schedule that encouraged people to actually have these small-group conversations (and bond about our topic of interest in particular).

Here's a preview of the end: judging from people's responses on social media and our exit survey, we succeeded at our goals of building community around lingcomm and creating a model conference.

in a way this is really obvious, but wow, virtual conferences are SO much better when they're organized and attended by people who believe that virtual conferences can be good

#LingComm21 was hands-down the best digital conference experience I’ve had; this thread does a great job explaining why

#LingComm21 has been an amazing conference so far, and while everyone has been sharing screenshots of the amazing digital space the organisation team has created for us, I also want to reflect on why this works so well for me and how our next online conferences can look like [thread]

In the following posts, collaboratively written with organizing committee members Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, we’ll walk through the design ingredients that we used to create this experience of community both on the scheduling side and on the platform side.

Part of a series called LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social. Stay tuned for the following posts during upcoming weeks, or subscribe to my newsletter to get the full list of posts sent to you once they’re all out.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

#lingcomm21 #lingcomm21 case study #conferences #community #lingcomm #conference #priya parker #em lazer-walker #art of gathering #virtual conferences #meta #advice

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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

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The fourth post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we designed the virtual space in Gather for LingComm21 to foster interaction and small-group conversation. Here are a few highlights:

Give people pretexts to spend time in the virtual space. While the session rooms themselves were mostly business, we added fun interactive details to the social spaces. The unexpected hit of the conference was the “magical duck” that dispensed emojis of snacks or dinosaurs, a fork of a Glitch bot by Alison Stevens that was inspired by an “emoji bar” created by Em Lazer-Walker. There were other Glitch bots, as well, largely inspired by the Gather Glitch bots by Janelle Shane, as well as Gather’s default interactive piano and whiteboard objects. Each day we added a new interactive experience or two so there was always something to discover. These “Easter eggs” motivated people to join early or wander around the space to find things, and sometimes served as convenient conversation starters (“have you gotten a snack from the duck yet?”). For one day, the cafe space was transformed into a “cat cafe” that included several images of cats (including a foreground image so that people could sit “under” the cat) as well as a livestream of kittens, which some people “stood around” watching for some time, thus allowing others to run into them organically. There are many great nature livestreams available on YouTube, and we think that they can be a great solution to the “cheese plate problem” of giving people objects of recurring interestingness to interact around.

It’s about the space, but it’s not about the space. Could we have made the Gather space more aesthetically attractive and with even more interactive Easter eggs? Yes. Would doing so have actually made more people use it, or the existing people gain more utility out of it? Probably not. It’s easy to attribute the success of the conference to the Gather space itself, but we’ve seen beautifully designed Gather spaces languish unused when more attention was paid to spatial design rather than temporal design — i.e., providing more and more elaborate rooms and pixel art rather than coming up with events and occasions and programming as a reason for people to keep coming back. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the architecture is in a community center without a calendar of events that provides reasons for people to drop by the community center regularly (and even a shabby building can be much beloved if it hosts warm and welcoming events), and the same thing is true in a virtual space.

Building elaborate spaces in Gather can be a fun hobby — it appeals to the same parts of our brains that like Lego and Minecraft and The Sims. But if you want other people to actually use your space beyond the initial tour, you need to know where to cut yourself off on the architecture side and direct the bulk of your energy to the people side, prioritizing ease of navigation over esoteric Easter eggs, and especially focusing on events and activities that give people a reason to come and get them actually interacting with each other. Yes, it’s scarier to reach out and invite real living people on the other side of the screen than it is to fuss with virtual furniture solo. But anyone who’s worth being friends with won’t mind if you invite them to your home when it’s still a bit messy, and your digital space doesn’t have to be pixel-perfect, either. In fact, for smaller groups we’ve found that embracing chaos and inviting your guests to help decorate the space with you can be a fun activity!

Read the full post.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

#lingcomm #lingcomm21 #lingcomm21 case study #meta #conferences #community #advice

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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

Link

The third post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we created the schedule for LingComm21 to integrate socialization and be reasonably timezone-friendly. Here are a few highlights:

Make the conference a shared experience, not solo homework. When people don’t have to travel for a conference, there’s sometimes a temptation to spread conference events across an entire month, or to assign conference homework of watching talks in advance, which makes it difficult for people to have a shared joint conference experience as an event that’s bounded in time. Pre-recorded talks and/or allowing talks to remain available after the conference may make sense for some conferences, but we’ve observed that watching talks as homework plus a live Q&A part often leads to live Q&A audiences who haven’t watched the talks, making presenters either deliver a short recap of the talk or else suffer in silence, and in any case not accomplishing our goals for this conference of encouraging participants to interact. Instead, we debuted each talk as a live presentation with live breakout groups and Q&A, and recorded only the larger sessions, which were available to attendees for a week following the conference (but not forever, to encourage more candid conversation). Some attendees who were in less convenient time zones reported watching the recorded talks before the next day of programming began, so this limited amount of time shifting helped us give attendees a shared conference experience without creating homework.

Make it possible for people to fit the event into their lives. As a new, fully virtual conference, we expected that it would be difficult to convince people to set aside entire days for this event. Additionally, we were hoping for synchronous participation from people in many areas of the world, and we knew that longer days would make this more challenging. We settled on a schedule of 4 days of 4-hour conference blocks, beginning each day at 20:00 UTC. [...]

Build interpersonal interaction into the experience. We had noticed that in many virtual conference environments, socializing and networking were, at best, easily avoidable add-ons. Because facilitating communication among this community was one of our primary goals, we instead made these central parts of the conference-going experience. In most of our session rooms, people “sat” at tables with others, rather than in rows of chairs. Sessions in these rooms included 20 minutes of panel discussion, 10 minutes of small breakout discussions, where people chatted with others at their tables about questions posed by the session’s panelists, and then 10 minutes of questions to the panel again. These breakout tables were self-chosen, rather than randomly assigned, meaning that people could choose to sit at a table where they already knew someone, choose to keep mixing it up, or even move to a different table midway through a session.

Read the full post.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

#lingcomm #lingcomm21 #lingcomm21 case study #meta #conferences #community #advice

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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

Link

The fifth post in our series about designing a virtual conference for community building from the ground up is co-authored with Liz McCullough and Lauren Gawne, and appears on LingComm.org. It’s about how we budgeted for LingComm21 and what other virtual events might want to take into consideration. Here are a few highlights:

Accessibility costs Although not all possible accessibility needs can be foreseen by conference organizers, and we did have a slot on the registration/participation forms asking about other accessibility requirements, the inaccessibility of audio content is extremely well known and formed part of our planning from the beginning.

Because LingComm21 was conducted primarily in English, and involved an international community that spans many linguistic areas, we decided on live captioning for the event, rather than interpreting for a specific signed language or several signed languages. Captions also provide an ancillary benefit for attendees who are hard of hearing, have auditory processing difficulties, or who speak English as a second language, in addition to providing a written reference for the organizers after the event. We had live captioning for 11 sessions throughout the conference, including all the introductory and plenary sessions. This cost around $5000 USD and constituted the single biggest expense for the LingComm21 conference.

We contacted captioning services for a quote as we were still figuring out the structure of the conference, which allowed us to reduce captioning costs by building in breaks for both the captioner and conference participants, meaning that we did not have to pay a second captioner to work in shifts to cover overly-long sessions (and also providing social benefits for participants as detailed in other posts). Reserving captioners early in the planning stages also allowed us to announce that captioning would be provided from the initial advertisement of the conference, rather than waiting for people to request it or invisibly assume that they were not welcome. Around 10% of participants who did the feedback survey said they used the captions, and the majority of the remaining 90% said that although they didn’t personally use them, they were happy to see them there, even though we didn’t solicit this information. (What can we say, the lingcomm community is pretty great.)

Read the full post.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Designing online conferences for building community

Scheduling online conferences for building community

Hosting online conferences for building community

Budgeting online conferences or events

Planning accessible online conferences

#lingcomm #lingcomm21 case study #lingcomm21 #meta #advice #conferences #community #virtual conferences #captioning #money

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superlinguo · 3 years

Text

LingComm21: a case study in making online conferences more social (blog post series)

In April 2021 I was part of the organising committee for the International Conference on Linguistics Communication (LingComm21). In putting togehter this conference we learnt a lot about running online events, and condensed everything we learnt into a series of blog posts. Some of these posts were written by Gretchen on the All Things Linguistic blog, and the others were posted on the LingComm website. Below I link to each post with a short paragraph of content.

Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)

Physical events come with decades and centuries of social infrastructure disguised as practical necessity and conference ritual that organizers have never really had to think about as social. Organizers put coffeebreaks in the schedule because every other conference they’ve been to has coffeebreaks and because of a vague assumption that people need caffeine, without considering the social benefits of giving people a reason to move around and shared objects to strike up conversations about. Imagine if every conference organizer also had to take on the architecture and interior design and urban planning of the conference space, and we can understand why the pivot to online conferences has gotten off to a rough start.

Designing online conferences for building community

Physical conferences that move online are beholden to the expectations of the attendees from previous years, expectations which may not map particularly well onto an online domain. A new online-first conference can set an entirely new pattern, potentially providing a model for useful features to be added onto other kinds of events as well.

Scheduling online conferences for building community

When people don’t have to travel for a conference, there’s sometimes a temptation to spread conference events across an entire month, or to assign conference homework of watching talks in advance, which makes it difficult for people to have a shared joint conference experience as an event that’s bounded in time. Pre-recorded talks and/or allowing talks to remain available after the conference may make sense for some conferences, but we’ve observed that watching talks as homework plus a live Q&A part often leads to live Q&A audiences who haven’t watched the talks, making presenters either deliver a short recap of the talk or else suffer in silence, and in any case not accomplishing our goals for this conference of encouraging participants to interact. Instead, we debuted each talk as a live presentation with live breakout groups and Q&A, and recorded only the larger sessions, which were available to attendees for a week following the conference (but not forever, to encourage more candid conversation).

Hosting online conferences for building community

We wanted attending this event to be as simple as walking into a conference center and being handed a paper program, rather than regularly leaving the conference platform to check on an informational email, to view a separate video feed, and so on. In addition to being frustrating technologically, frequent program-surfing would increase the number of potential distractions each attendee might face. Thus, as much as possible, we embedded things within Gather, including the programming schedule, the editable list of meetups, and video feeds of larger panel sessions. The physicality of the schedule, meetups, and intros documents also gave people an object of joint attention to use as an excuse to move around the space and interact with fellow attendees.

Budgeting online conferences or events

Physical conference budgets are massive, and that’s even taking into account that the conferences outsource most of the costs of travel, accommodation and feeding people to the participants. People are used to getting things for free on the internet, and online conferences are much, much more financially accessible than physical events, but for a good conference to be run well, people should expect there to be some cost.

To keep up to date with LingComm news you can subscribe to the LingComm feed or follow LingComm on Twitter.

#linguistics #lingcomm #conference #online #events #lingcomm21 #gather

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