Is the conference format dead? No, but most organizers are archaic. Yesterday at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) I was part of a small group of experts that discussed an aspect of that-- digital conferencing.

The amazingly committed scholars in attendance included Bob Stein (Annenberg Center, Institute for the Future of the Book), Michael Naimark (USC), Tom Moritz (GRI Chief of Knowledge Management), Bill Tronzo (Stanford Humanities Center), Katja Zelljadt (GRI), Ben Vershbow (Institute for the Future of the Book) who is deeply involved in open source academic publishing and founded the Voyager company and -remotely- Maman Ahmed (University of Chicago). 

The associate director of the Getty Research Institute, Gail Feigenbaum, started off by painting a dark image of the contemporary landscape of academic conferencing by acknowledging the dismal state of affairs at many such events, which are all too often rather anesthetizing instead of lively. She pointed out that many art historians are now trying to divorce themselves from slide projectors. At the last CAA conference I was stunned by the rooms filled with slide projectors, even after Kodak ceased their production. For art historians this instrumental challenge is a complex issue with massive amounts of high quality reproductions only being available in slide libraries. To scan them all is a costly effort and the traditional juxtaposition of two images, which is part and parcel to the field, is hard to recreate with a video projector and OpenOffice.

Bill Tronzo argued that when it comes to conferences, many academics are conservative beasts, who are not very likely to contribute to pre-event discussions. For many of them, conferences are banquets for their egos rather than occassions for animated discourse. And, facing the relative absence of financial gain in academia, what many academics really want is praise.

Short of creating a new orthodoxy of event-creation, which is not the goal here: what is the ideal conferencing format? Well, there is not an all out answer to that-- the formats and technologies used for an event need to be determined by its content. The number of contributors (the n-factor) matters. The AccessGrid, for example, allows for the connection of thousands of people, which mostly excites technicians (" I can connect more people than you.") We have to go beyond the I-do-because-I-can mentality and ask what the networked thousands will talk about in meaningful ways. Otherwise, we merely end up with networked ego casting. Sure, a synergy appears if a small group of people with similar interests sits down together but also large groups can have inspiring and consequential conversations if facilitators know what they are doing.

Events need an element of play and an air of experimentation to be exciting. Just look at the Dropping Knowledge conference that took place in Berlin recently. Organizers collected 100 questions, created a huge round table (perhaps ready for Guinness Book of Records) and brought together hundreds of participants to respond. Such events can inspire and as Ben Vershbow suggested, we can also look to films like My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle, 1981) or the The Five Obstructions (Lars van Trier, 2003) to learn about possible event structures or approach the event as a game with Fluxus-like rules. Much insight into event organization comes from experience and one of the lessons learned is that we should not bother inviting divas who don't do their homework or may not even show up for the event. An additional issue is, of course, the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, which starts with the problem of the wildly different professional languages. Will an architect and a medievalist be able to have a beneficial conversation about their work without linguistic mediation? To find translators, people who are really at home in both fields, will be exceptionally difficult.

This social conference dynamic and the "combinatorics" of event formats have been often discussed. There have been plenty of experiments with event formats in the past ten years. After the Free Cooperation (FC) conference in 2004, Geert Lovink and I phrased much of our thinking about event-based practice and the ills of academic discourse in our essay The ABC’s of Conferencing. In this text we mounted a critique of traditional conferencing formats and proposed the term "panelism," a concept which had a bit of a life of its own ever since. At the FC conference (image to the left) we experimented with numerous formats and rejected the lecture and panel format. Recently, the breakdown of the audience- speakers gap was labeled as unconferencing.

But what is often not sufficiently investigated is the role of technologies at discursive events. Tom Moritz asked the group to apprehend and respond to what the sciences are doing for the past 50 years. He pointed to the accretive nature of knowledge in the sciences where institutes may not even publish the names of authors, given that there are sometimes up to 60 co-authors for one single paper. The institute becomes the author (or Wikipedia takes on authorial identity). Are scientists better than humanists at building up knowledge? With Del.icio.us everybody becomes a friendly librarian and given the many anonymous users, the Del.icio.us system takes on distributed authorship. Moritz pointed us to the fact that there are substantial problems with issues of authority in these open knowledge repositiories.

How can the lead-up process as well as the outcome of an event be best encapsulated in a document, Bob Stein asked. He likened all stages of discursive event organization to a "book." Quoting Christopher Hitchens, Tom Moritz added that, “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Sure, but one thing is clear-- technologies are more than merely capturing tools for event documentation. Technology is about more than record keeping and or a mnemonic event take-away! We can't isolate the digital components of a conference as attached "parts" that are in charge of the archive. We would not want to think of our bodies as having "parts" either, do we? The event body is a cohesive entity and technologies can drive discourse each step of the way.
 
Event facilitators should be able to make playful use of the haystack of communication tools that are best suited to the conversations that they hope to ensue over time. Quick brain storming sessions are best served by Instant Messaging, which allows the quick kicking back and forth of ideas. However, for reflective exchanges, Instant Messaging is not well suited. To know which key to play on the keyboard of communication-enhancing technologies requires quite a bit of experience and an overview of the constantly changing landscape of emerging sociable technologies- from vSocial to TimetoMeet, BubblePLY, Thinkature, Zotero, SubEthaEdit, OCS, Del.icio.us, phpbb.

An interesting idea was presented by Julian Bleeker recently. He suggested the notion of the theory object, which refers to the practice of assigning an idiosyncratic tag to a concept or an event. On Del.icio.us, this allows for the tracking of the influence, or spreading of a given concept (at least in the fairly tech-dominated world of Del.icio.us). Such tracking of our people who also saved this URL indicates influence in the micro-world of Del.icio.us. Nano-fame.  Today Google's PageRank is supposed to direct our slef-worth as an indicator for fame.
Today, social capital is immediately interfaced, made visible to large numbers of people who can check every waking minute of the day. Today we are not famous for 15 minutes but famous to 15 people, as Momus wrote in 1991.
 
Owning a luxurious car does make you a good driver and equally, having expensive communication tools to your avail does not guarantee more social bandwidth or good discourse at your event. In fact, I often found that simple low tech tools like the iSight camera were an easy and reliable plug-and-go solution that was far more useful than voice-tracking systems that follow you through the room. We need to use communication technologies in our favor and even a small threshold such as having to remember yet another user name and password can become a serious obstacle to potential participation. The use of real-time documentation of events, as fascinating as it may be for the 16 people who possibly tune in, is fairly non-sensical. Does it really matter if viewers online see this or that lecture exactly at the time that it is presented? I don't think so. In addition, institutions need to truly establish an audience for their live webcasts, which may take years of continuous event series. Who wants to watch a small head behind a podium for longer than 2 minutes anyway? The audio is a different story. I often listen to podcasts of lectures in the background. But I very, very rarely watch a lecture online for a longer stretch of time, simply because it's visually dull. 

The usefulness of "google jockeying" at conferences was another issue that we discussed. In conferences or university classes, the majority of participants sits there with their laptop, back channeling while the speaker presents. Michael Naimark, who coined the term "google jockeying" described positive experiences with it at USC. I do this too: while lecturers present, I follow up on their references or occasionally buy the book that they mention. It is a particular kind of engagement. It's like taking a bath in information but it is not conducive to reflection. "Students and conference participants do it anyway." I'm not in favor of google jockeying in the classroom because I am not in favor of continuous partial attention. Is "google jockeying" like teenage sex in the sense that Bible-thumping requests for abstinence are pointless? Sure, kids do it anyway. Michael argued that "back channels" projected next to the presenter (i.e. professor) may serve the function of teaching the teacher who has the opportunity to tune in with the class. The comments, however, very often drift off-topic.

A more recent occurrence is the socialization of discourse in networked environments like SecondLife or networked games. Howard Rheingold and Lawrence Lessig spoke in SecondLife and Ken Wark and Bob Stein were interviewed in the game This Spartan Life. Technically these games are still in their infancy with massive bandwidth problems, in SecondLife, for example. Most debates in these contexts, once their novelty has worn off, are dead boring-- often even a waste of time. But there are also possibilities that we should not dismiss. The fact that in SecondLife people meet behind the mask of their avatar may be empowering to some of them and it is a useful environment for collaborative rapid prototyping.

There are no set answers but rather we should strive for a playful use of the available event formats and technologies-- looking closely and then look again, at what works best for the discourse at hand. There is no silver bullet for the future of intellectual discourse, trial-and-error, with each of them being many times more valuable then the common soporific event structures that we are all too used to.