Are communities the new conference?
I asked this question in our monthly video call of the perpetual beta coffee club [PBCC] which I facilitate. There was almost universal agreement that people prefer to engage in communities, both online and in-person, rather than a conference, particularly ones that have a lot of vendors. The PBCC was a significant sanity check for many of us during the lock-downs of the early stages of the SARS-2 pandemic. For the first few months we switched to weekly video calls so we could stay in touch and find out what was happening around the world.
Asynchronous, continuous online communities like ours provide something that most conference do not — time for reflection and deep conversations.
As I noted in coffee, communities, and condescension, as online activity grows, we all need safe places to learn and reflect. Yes, we can be engaged on public platforms, but we need to find safe places to have deeper conversations. Communities can offer a diversity of opinions and experiences. It is essential for every citizen today to develop and engage with a diverse network of knowledgeable people in order to make sense of the world. Citizens also need somewhere to integrate their learning and get trusted advice.
As far back as 2010 I wrote about the conference rut and that one thing missing in these discrete time-based events is time for reflection. Most presenters hold back their knowledge in order to ‘deliver’ it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions and discussions and a coffee break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home.
While reflecting on reflection in 2014, I noted that much of the workday in a professional office (or in a distributed workplace) is organized around meetings, calls, and getting things done. This is often interrupted dozens of times each day, requiring a re-focus on whatever it is people were doing before the interruption. Work, like professional conferences, is composed of many non-related discrete, time-based events, often with one directly following the other.
I currently participate in a small private online community looking at the modern workplace, as well as managing the PBCC, and have recently joined the Asynco community focused on distributed work. What I learn from these communities is more than any conference could offer. For instance, I have developed many close friendships over the past five years of the PBCC.
I think we may see many communities created to fill the professional development and relationship gap that exists in too many disciplines today. We may also see conferences getting organized from inside communities, flipping the role of conference organizer trying to sell sponsorships and participation, to more community-driven agendas. We plan on discussing this in more detail in our communities and I’m sure there will be many insights shared.
What would you expect from a professional community?
Excellent reading. We have been considering the review and redesign of learning and development experiences for some time now. This speaks to the core of the issue at many conferences with little time for both reflection and deeper practice with peers and people from other disciplines who can offer different perspectives.
Hi, Harold,
RE: ‘Communities can offer a diversity of opinions and experiences. It is essential for every citizen today to develop and engage with a diverse network of knowledgeable people in order to make sense of the world. Citizens also need somewhere to integrate their learning and get trusted advice’
I guess that pretty much explains the poor state of conference events nowadays and why more and more people are looking elsewhere to have that “time for reflection and deep conversations”, as you well stated. That lack of a strong sense of belonging, when you are treated as just another number to profit from at the expense of, is probably one poignant issue that should worry event organisers.
But also time, involvement, scale, purpose, co-creation, etc. etc. Conferences have stopped focusing on the people attending them, whereas communities of practice, as you well know, focus mostly on their community members: the people. That’s essentially why I think plenty of folks are thinking deeper whether it’s worth attending a conference event in the their current state, or instead invest their energy, intent and effort in engaging in communities. I know the answer to that one. I made that choice already. My communities.
I guess there is a lot of upcoming work to be done for event organisers to get their act together, but, for as long as they see their events as entertainment, and not as a deeper learning experience, I don’t think they would ever recover.
Time will tell …
I think there were some good comments made in the post about conferences and communities
I agree that conferences are great places to pick up new ideas – however, the problem is that there is little time to reflect on issues raised but also come back to the author of the pieces.
I found that I took notes and a lot of the best thoughts either as you say hit me that night on a train or flight home or at 3:00 am. Also, it is increasingly difficult to sell to a boss attendance at events. (Speaking personally I had to be presenting – getting a reduction on the cost of attending and if it was overseas I had to be able to do some work for the region to justify the cost of my attendance).
In my area of KM work – I’ve seen the rise of the paid-for webinar replacing the conference, it is shorter in length but still has the defects of a conference. I noted your comment about conferences being entertainment – I think I’d rather watch a good concert or a theatre show in my local cinema than attend an industry conference. Taylor Swift, it ain’t though maybe conference organisers can have a halftime Superbowl show…..
Often in the presentations they tended to be on the ra ra side and didn’t set up what hadn’t worked and the challenges they faced which would have been of use for those looking to adapt the findings to use in their organisation.
There are a couple of reasons why I think communities may be better than conferences.
1. Brass tacks – it costs a lot to send X or Y to a conference not only in lost time, conference attendance, hotel, and travel costs – let’s say from a UK perspective £2500.00 +. It is a lot easier sell to say to a manager can I have say £150 to be part of an ongoing community to identify new ideas and discuss ideas that I have in a safe setting.
2. It’s an engaging process where it isn’t a chalk-and-talk lecture where you sit in a room being talked at. The best ones are David Gurteen’s knowledge cafe approach where its a 15-minute talk and then a discussion around a question for 15 minutes then a report back. (It has its flaws but it is still better than chalk and talk)
3. You have an opportunity to try out new ideas
4. Community members are often members of other communities so can bring those thoughts into the discussion or after a while of being a member might facilitate a meeting with another connection to help you out.
5. The big conferences tend to be too big and you can’t meet with the people you want to meet to have a chat whereas in a community you can have a chat with a member of the community outside if you want to.
6. Communities can regulate their size to remain effective (Dunbar’s law of 150 people seems relevant. Though a community can be ‘split’ for example the reason that a person joins community X is around distributed work and wants to talk to colleagues in that area not only through a community chat but also via regular meetings (see my point above)
7. Communities now are more global in their outlook due to the rise of tools such as Zoom and Teams as all as opportunities to collaborate using Slack or Teams. This brings in different working cultures and approaches into the mix.
8. Communities do it for the ‘love’ and wanting to help their members development like the old Masonic guilds. Conferences by and large do it for the profit Though communities need to make sure that they invest in tools that support the community and pay for that through the community. A community not only needs people it needs tools to facilitate the community which need to be covered.
9. I don’t get a bad cold from a community where I often do from a conference (or these days potentially something worse)
10. If you are an organisation committed to environmental targets a community is more carbon neutral than a conference and less wasteful (how many conference goody bags do you still use)
Excellent reading
Excellent thread