I wonder if the search for an alternative to the “hallway track” could actually be fruitful.
Speaking for myself I never benefited much from the hallway track, because it relies on the type of in-person socializing skills that I’ve always struggled with. Conferences feel like a grown-up intellectual version of a junior high dance to me! A virtual forum could be a boon to people with good technical ideas but high introversion.
Of course, maybe one’s passion for research is supposed to override one’s shyness. I’m unsure which bar I personally failed to clear :-)
> A virtual forum could be a boon to people with good technical ideas but high introversion.
This sounds like IRC, or whatever the preference is these days.
As a conference organiser myself, I think it's perfectly fine for people to not enjoy the hallway track.
These people might be the ones who benefit the most from sitting in the talk room, and being exposed to the variety of ideas that a conference would hopefully offer.
I also think that it's perfectly fine to just crowd around a speaker (at least, in pre-COVID times), and just listen in on the technical conversations that other attendees are having with them.
I am part of half a dozen hallway tracks which are basically email threads (two are is a digests) each of which stretches back decades. Like the hallways you can dip in or drop out for a little while (just delete threads that don't call out to you) and fortunately all seem to have attracted new entrants over time. There's a small but significant inter-thread overlap as well.
In any conference the hallway track is the most important to me and it has happened more than once that I have failed to attend a single formal presentation yet found the conference a great success. But I have noticed that these threads are just as vital.
Of late all of them have switched to 80% covid-19 of course. Fortunately not exclusively.
At work we've taken to creating a dozen 'rooms' or 'hallways' or 'tables' to mingle with on certain days. It's expected one bounces from one conversation to the next and mingle. It's surprisingly effective!
Another aspect of conferences is their carbon budget. I attended a conference last year in SF that had a large section on climate change. It was estimated the 35,000 attendees traveled a cumulative 35,000,000 miles and emitted about 17,000 tonS of carbon. A virtual conference would eliminate this. But then you lose the hallway effect.
I think this has more potential than the OP considered, but you have to optimize for asynchronous communication. Have conversations in chat, but if there's someone you want to talk to in particular direct message or email them. If the two of you seem mutually interested in each other's ideas, set up a time to have a live conversation
Yes, but a forum where you would expect the quality of discussion to be high.
I feel some sympathy for grad students, but am personally quite excited to see how this plays out since I've wanted virtual conferences to be more of a thing since I started pirating Blackhat/DEF CON videos as a teenager :)
you are right we have voice notes option for that which is digital version of sticky notes.
They remain active for 24 hours only in your inbox.
You can use it as voice chat also.
You should download app for android and recommend to your friends too:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.demo.muspic...
You don't "have" to. But you either present multiple times; we used to do this for webinars--I think we mostly don't any longer because most people watch on-demand anyway.
Or you split the difference of about 9 hours of time zones to accommodate the western US through central Europe with the event starting about 7am in California and ending around 9pm in Europe. And, for a US event, you basically ignore Asia.
One of the largest international demoscene competitions was just held over twitch (Revision 2020 [1]). It normally has a few thousand attendees + a live stream, but this year was just the stream and twitch chat. In lieu of having people come to the venue, they released a game that was a model of the venue, so you could walk around and have some of the same experience as going [2]. At any given time the main stream had several thousand people watching and in chat.
This all worked pretty well for what is decidedly a very social activity, I presume breakouts could just happen in other streams with a moderator handling chat q&a for the presenter.
In practice, people consumed the keynote/talk content in a variety of formats (streamed, recorded, and in-VR) and there was a fantastic networking and meeting-new-people effect in the poster, hallway (post-talk), and demo sessions. There's a bunch of formal research that was done there along with post-conference surveys to track down specific data (e.g., how many new people did you meet?) but it will take some time for those teams to rigorously collect & report.
> Unlike most other research fields which primarily focus on publishing in journals, conferences ended up being the primary publication and presentation venue in CS.
The irony of this seems lost on the author. While I am glad that CS has truly split into a scientific discipline separate both from mathematics and engineering (this was not yet the case when I was in school), CS of all disciplines should be able to progress remotely.
Physics has been the innovator in this regard, with preprint journals (Physics review letters grew from letters into a journal) to HTTP & HTML, and open preprint servers. It's a pity that CS has gone the other way, which limits its openness to scientists around the world!
CS does progress remotely—the publishing model in CS allows authors to easily and openly distribute our papers by putting them up on arvix and our webpages which doesn’t seem to be true of physics journals.
The post is directed to solving the problems of networking. It doesn’t say anything about the orthogonal problem of open access of research.
I mentioned physics pecifically because it is the progenitor of this approach.
> CS allows authors to easily and openly distribute our papers by putting them up on arvix and our webpages which doesn’t seem to be true of physics journals.
ArXiv started as a physics preprint server so I don’t understand how you could claim that physicists don’t have such a system. And of course WWW and HTML came from physics, not computer science.
More to the point, though physics also has conferences, modern physics developed In the early 20th mostly without them travel was more complex in those days. The modern conception of journals dates to this period (and cf my comments about Physics Letters).
Conferences as experienced in CS are even less vital in mathematics than in Physics.
None of which is to claim physicists are somehow superior in some way! I’m just saying that it’s ironic that CS, of all disciplines, has a social model more like the social science than the physical sciences. Perhaps that is what should change, and there are good wxetant models to follow.
I don't know if there is an equivalent. The beauty of conferences are the unscripted, chance encounters with other attendees. I gave a talk at last year's PyBay (bay area python conference) and the magic of it was in the side conversations leading up to the talk and then after it. Heck, I even nailed $20k worth of consulting work from hanging out at a random table. This cannot happen in a virtual setting.
I run the SF Django Meetup and we're hosting a nationwide virtual meetup this upcoming Wednesday. We have over 350 people RSVP'd and though I'm excited about bringing so many people together, it's not lost on me that those magical serendipitous moments aren't going to happen.
The two biggest challenges I've seen are hallway track (defined broadly) and just engagement/bandwidth. Not that people aren't distracted by their phones while they're in sessions, but it's that much worse sitting in your office watching what is effectively a webinar--assuming you've even set aside the time and bother to tune in.
I'll be involved in some virtual conference chats over the next few weeks. We'll see how it goes.
The number of drunk/hungover/obviously coding people I've seen at tech conferences makes me realize what your saying isn't much different. Your either paying attention and interested or your not. Being there doesn't help. They're just there for the drinks
If you don't set aside the time why did you sign up?
>If you don't set aside the time why did you sign up?
It seemed like it might be interesting at the time I signed up. It's not unusual for me to have 2 or even 3 low-priority things on my calendar at the same time. To say nothing of ongoing projects that seem more urgent on a given day and which I don't want to interrupt for some webinar.
There's a lot of stuff on my calendar that's either standing calls that I join if the agenda or immediate situation warrants or interesting-looking presentations that I'll listen to on a time-available basis but which aren't necessary.
Covid-19 or not, it's time to formally divorce the hallway track from the rest. We should have more event's whose explicit purpose is to discuss and collaborate, rather than it be hiding other some measurable rat-race ritual.
I got news for you, the Hallway Track is an important part of any industry conference. Like, I make comics, I go to comic cons, and while sitting on the show floor selling my stuff to whoever wanders by and looks interested is an important part of the whole thing, so’s stepping away from the table to have a meeting with a publisher, so’s dinner and events after the show floor closes.
SF cons are like this too, though “making various social connections with other people who have this niche interest” is a big part of why you’re explicitly there. Meet weirdos you don’t have to explain your weird interest to, hang out, have some activities to share but feel free to make up your own fun and games.
The organized portion of any conference is there to provide a starting point for some of the Hallway Track, and an excuse for you to leave your normal life behind for a few days to commit to being in the same place as a bunch of other people who do whatever the con’s about.
> I know it's not just an academic conference thing
Yes me too.
> an excuse for you to leave your normal life behind for a few days to commit to being in the same place as a bunch of other people who do whatever the con’s about
Exactly, I don't want an excuses. I think we should be honest with each other about the value of the hallway track alone and not need an excuse. I think that honesty will lead to better outcomes.
To make this concrete https://andreaspk.github.io/ghc-week.html was an event I was very excited to go to before Covid-19 led to its cancellation, and very much is a hallway track without the rest.
1. Pure "Collaboration" being a "soft" nice-sounding word institutions won't buy your plane tickets for.
Planes are bad and those institutions are being bad for thinking that collaboration. Do cheaper rail-accessible regional events, which also help with communication graph ossification and density, to negotiate with them better.
2. Academic rat race becoming ever more pernicious as job market grows tighter.
Academia is broken and research is yielding a lot less per cost than it used to. Academia needs to fix its shit or some right-wing goverment is going to succeed in turning off the money hose. I have zero interest in seeing status-quo-preserving procrastination on this front.
3. People that aren't qualified to partake in hallway chat are still eyeballs for marketting at industry conferences.
Let's not hitch everything good in the world to the monster than is marketing and advertising?
4. Big conferences are more glamorous
Giant hotel are is tasteless and so are people that uncritically enjoy them. But OK fine, Vegas conferences are exempt from my proposals.
It works for senior people at small scale. I attend one event in particular that has presentations on a pretty varied set of topics. But, while they tend to be very good, they're really just there to give the event a little structure and there's lots of time set aside for more informal interactions.
It's hard to do that at a big event where a lot of attendees really are there to learn the latest features of Product X. And furthermore, I imagine a lot of managers would look askance at a request to travel across the country and hang out for a few days.
Well it would be a smaller event, and there are many discussions to be had about exclusivity and what-not. I might add a lottery-random element so it doesn't get to clubby.
But these are exactly the sorts of conversions that many communities should be having anyways.
Speaking for myself I never benefited much from the hallway track, because it relies on the type of in-person socializing skills that I’ve always struggled with. Conferences feel like a grown-up intellectual version of a junior high dance to me! A virtual forum could be a boon to people with good technical ideas but high introversion.
Of course, maybe one’s passion for research is supposed to override one’s shyness. I’m unsure which bar I personally failed to clear :-)