Conferences calling–what’s new at PLN
What’s new at the PALINET Leadership Network, PLN?
We’re fleshing out the Conferences and presentations category to make it a useful (and largely original) set of resources for all current and future leaders:
- Presentations has more good advice on traditional presentations–and focuses entirely on traditional and semi-traditional presentations.
- Presentation alternatives has (and will have) a growing set of commentaries on new forms of presentation such as Pecha Kucha, fishbowls and lightning talks.
- Conference-speaker arrangements discusses ways that conference arrangements and invited speakers can work together to make “outside” speaking be as comfortable as possible for all involved.
- Conferences and presentations–why leaders should care serves as an overview to the whole category.
- Coming soon: Coping with conferences, the last currently-planned article in this cluster–but the overview includes areas where we’d love to have contributions or pointers to likely source material.
There probably won’t be a post next week; the holiday season hits us all.
Best wishes (and here’s to a better 2009!) to you and yours from the PALINET Leadership Network.
That’s this week’s post from PLN Highlights.
Not a subscriber? You should be–although, admittedly, I always echo the PLN Highlights posts here.
Not a PLN member or active user? You’re missing some great resources for anyone who is or aspires to be a leader of any sort (manager, director, project leader, thought leader, association leader…).
Why not make it a New Year’s resolution: Join PLN, tell a friend, use it–and help make it better.
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Walt –
Please take this as constructive criticism, but I can’t help but think that this cluster is a little behind the 8-ball. In light of budget crunches and concerns over environmental impacts, the face-to-face conference seems to be going by the wayside. Just this month, Apple announced that it wasn’t coming to MacWorld conferences after this year. It said:
Perhaps what libraries should be looking for is ways to “reach more people” without having a face-to-face meetings. Conference calls, webcasts, online learning environment, etc., may be where we should be focusing our efforts now with ways to bring the “why do we do them” reasons to the forefront without all of the detriments of the traditional conference.
Or did I miss something that is already on PLN?
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Peter,
You mean behind the curve, don’t you? The cluster certainly doesn’t put PLN in a difficult position from which it is unlikely to escape–even if F2F conferences were on the way out.
No, as it happens, I really don’t believe that face-to-face conferences are going away. Will there be lower attendance? Possibly. Will there be fewer commercial conferences? Maybe not a terrible thing. Will there be more unconferences and alternative forms appealing to driving-area groups? Yes, I believe so–and two of the original articles in the cluster deal with unconferences.
But do you really believe ALA, Midwinter, or most of the state library conferences are going to disappear so rapidly that the PLN articles are worthless? Really? Code4Lib filled its registration limit very quickly. 2009 Midwinter preregistration is considerably ahead of 2008.
I’d be delighted to have more “alternatives” articles, but no, I don’t really believe that webcasts, conference calls, etc. will or should wholly replace in-person conferences. At least not any time soon. I believe this cluster provides useful information for at least the next few years and probably longer. If I’m wrong–well, the wiki hasn’t reached its size limit yet. (Given that MediaWiki powers Wikipedia, I think we have a ways to go.)
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:32 am
You’re right about my misuse of the phrase “behind the 8-ball” when “behind the curve” is more appropriate. (I’m hoping the links will help explain the phrases to non-English speakers who may not be familiar with the idioms.)
I don’t think face-to-face conferences will be going away in the next few years either, but I think their importance will be dramatically reduced and that Apple’s move is a bellwether (did I use that right) of that trend. I remember when Comdex was cancelled a few years back. Four years ago Gartner (in a trade journal article) said, “a ‘perfect’ storm of factors such as tightened travel budgets, declining show profits and the increasing expense of Vegas … combined to cause the show’s decline. Gardner also said that the mainstreaming and splintering of the IT industry made a single show less applicable.”
The Code4Lib meeting itself is evidence of “mainstreaming and splintering” in the library community: library technologists (many of whom are not “librarians” and therefore are somewhat distant from the core ALA constituency) moved to fill a pent-up demand. But Code4Lib is more than the meeting — it is a couple dozen people who chat and share expertise daily on IRC, a mailing list for more asynchronous communication, an RSS aggregator that broadcasts the conversation of its members, and a journal that documents some of the polished practices of the library technologist field. (Did I forget anything? Not bad for an ad hoc group.)
The PLN articles certainly aren’t worthless, but taking the leadership aspect of PLN into account, I’m trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to advocate for an expanded cluster that describes how libraries can take advantage of newer communication means. I’m hard pressed to write a definitive document on the topic, but I’m hoping you can find someone else who can.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:50 am
Peter: The number of links in your post caused it to be trapped as spam, but I check the spam list every morning…
Would you mind if I copy some of these points over to either Talk on one of the PLN articles or a new Forum topic? I think it’s an interesting and complex discussion, one with few clear answers.
I’d love to see an expanded cluster with more alternatives; every cluster in PLN is open for expansion, and the overview article actually specifically requests new articles–but I’m not in a position to commission them, and have limited resources to write them myself. Either I find good blog posts or, well, they don’t necessarily get written.
I’ll probably add some discussion to the overview article and maybe spin off a Challenge question and/or another article. (As, to be sure, I’m getting ready for Midwinter and Canada’s closest thing to a library megaconference, the OLA SuperConference.)
December 23rd, 2008 at 10:36 am
Yes, please do copy it over to PLN. There are more thoughts dancing along with the sugar plums in my head, but ’tis not the season to get them down into a coherent form. Maybe someone will pick up the topic, or maybe I can get back to it on PLN myself.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Done–segments of all four comments are on the Talk page for the overview.