Earlier this year, I made it a point to attend more conferences, especially about topics outside of my usual niche. This has so far resulted in my attending Lambdaconf and Gophercon, the former of which I have written about previously.
The latter, Gophercon, got a ton of quality coverage, so I’ll refrain from adding to the noise. Instead, I’d like to reflect on the social interactions that happened off the presentation stage, both offline and online, using Gophercon as a focusing point:
With the ever increasing popularity of conference recording setups, it is often possible to watch all the talks without having to make travel arrangements or get up early in the morning. Videos can be paused, sped up and rewound, potentially presenting a superior viewing experience than that of attending in person. What video can’t provide is the chance to meet like-minded enthusiasts and, with some courage, to interact with speakers and celebrities.
It was a lot of fun soaking up the atmosphere and cold approaching random attendees. However, my impression was that the persons who got the most out of the conference were those who had formed relationships with others over the net, in IRC rooms, over Twitter, back and forth on mailing lists and so on. Matching internet handles to faces seemed to have a reunion-like effect, compared to the familiarity of attending with a clique of friends/coworkers. The speakers had an alternate advantage, where they only needed to explain their story once in order to introduce themselves to the entire assembly.
Those attendees on both sides of the stage seemed to have the most success in getting themselves into deeper discussions, while I spent most of my time introducing myself and learning about other personal backgrounds. That was not a bad situation to be in, but it was interesting to see how social media and speaking had the effect of short-circuiting introductions, allowing people who all but met in person to hit conversational ground running.
In a somewhat reactive attempt to join the social media bandwagon, I had recently signed up for Twitter myself, after the Gophercon organizers used it to procure a wait-list admission ticket for me. Their forwarding my Email to the reselling party was incredibly helpful, as I did not have an account at the time. So I signed up aftewards, to avoid relying on others to send messages on my behalf like that again. Later, Twitter was a very convenient source of news regarding the conference and extra-talk events. But many days later, I have yet to fire off a single tweet.
My reservation is that after the conferences came and went, the sheer number of people to follow began to conflict with my striving towards a low-information diet. While I intuitively agree that such tools are effective at forging the kinds of persistent relationships I witnessed at conferences, the sheer number of interesting links shared can become a dark playground of sorts.
Social media was a great tool for tracking the backchannel at conferences, I’m just not sure that it’s the tool that I need right now. Part of the reason is that habitual social media interaction has a bit of an opportunity cost at the expense of time for tinkering and learning. At the same time, there’s a point for not working in a vacuum. I suppose there are these opposing concerns, one to know enough people to enhance my conference experience next time, while preventing social media from hijacking my free time.
With all that said, would I recommend going to conferences without knowing anyone beforehand? Regardless of how many people you know, the energy of being in a time and place can be well worth the experience. But proportional to any investments in travel and lodging expenses, I would recommend investing some time in getting to know fellow attendees, long before the event has even started.