Given various people on here interested in organizing cryptography conferences, I thought the below would be interesting. -Allen From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu> X-URL: http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/rre.html X-Mailing-List: <rre@weber.ucsd.edu> archive/latest/1259 Notes on organizing conferences Phil Agre August 1996 This article is adapted from the post mortem that I write immediately after organizing the 1994 CPSR Annual Meeting, together with notes to myself from other meetings I have been involved in organizing. Its purpose is to offer future organizers the benefit of our experience. I accepted the job of program chair because I wanted to develop my skills for organizing events, and I definitely learned some things along the way. One thing I learned is apparently very subtle, since I've never seen or heard of anybody explaining it. The professional world has a special way of defining identity: people are identified with issues. When I started planning the program, my initial approach was simply to start with the most dynamic individuals in the general area that CPSR covers. So I sent out a batch of e-mail messages to well-connected personages, asking them who we should get to speak. Alas, few of them were able to say anything very useful, saying (usually in a nice way) that they regarded my request as overly vague. I gather that one is supposed to decide first what issues to cover, and then ask who is associated with that issue. For example, "who are some good people to speak on the political aspects of building community networks?" Or, "who is a good person to speak on technology activism on issues affecting people with disabilities?" This is nearly the only form of question I could get answered. Even a simple variant like, "who has something fresh and original to say about topic X?" didn't work very well. It's as though everyone maintains a lookup table in their heads, indexing people to issues. Having started this way, some other problems then arise. Sometimes you can't get the number one speaker on a given issue to speak, so then you ask who else you might get, and you'll get some more names. It's good to ask whether so-and-so is a good speaker or not. Sometimes you'll hear someone say something bad (or something diplomatically irrelevant) about a potential speaker whom you haven't met, and such comments will probably weigh heavily with you, for the simple reason that it's a disaster to schedule an unskilled or irresponsible speaker on your program. This dynamic bothered me, since it seemed to have a built-in tendency to reinforce a single individual's standing even though other people might be equally talented; if someone already has a reputation as a speaker in a given area, those other people don't get invited to speak, so they can't develop reputations as speakers. I had a certain amount of success asking, "who deserves a chance to be heard on this issue?", and some people even volunteered the names of people who they felt deserved a chance. This made me feel better. Start early. You need to get your publicity out in time for monthly publications listing in their schedule. I don't know when precisely this is, since we didn't come close to making the deadline. I didn't start the publicity machinery for our October conference until we had every last speaker pinned down in early summer. Big mistake: people go on vacation in the summer, and your rate of progress in assembling the program will plummet starting in late June. Identify your prominent, featured speakers and get them pinned down first; they're the only ones you need to get your publicity under way. I found e-mail seductive; it's easy to publicize something to the whole net in a few days, so I conveniently forgot that large parts of the world don't read announcements on the net -- print publicity is still absolutely necessary. We had a professional PR person working for us. She works at UCSD in the PR office. She's perfectly good at her job, but I've learned some lessons for working with such people in the future. One is to clarify goals. My central goal was to get a lot of interesting people to attend our meeting; this meant PR aimed at obtaining advance publicity. UCSD's main goal, though, was to get lots of press coverage on the day of the meeting itself; this meant PR aimed at getting reporters to attend the meeting. These two goals are equally valid, but they happen on different schedules. Local advance publicity mostly happened in the three or four days before the meeting, and with a little effort we did well. We made some mistakes in the meeting brochure. One was that the brochure only mentioned the three main speakers, even though it had room for much more. This might not have been so bad, except that the three-line summaries of those three speakers' speeches all sounded pretty similar. I have no way of knowing how much difference this made to the final turnout, but I do think we should have taken more conscious care to identify broad categories of people we wanted in attendance, and then making sure each one sees something on the brochure that they find appealing. When this problem came up, we made a single-page (front and back of a green sheet of paper) version of the electronic meeting announcement, including the full program and registration information. We ended up distributing hundreds of these, and I am sure that they gave lots of people a good idea of what the organization is about. I made some mistakes when booking the speakers for the meeting. I don't regret any of the people we chose, though I ended up disagreeing with a couple of them much more intensely than I had thought I would. The problem was with financial matters. We had a $500-per-speaker budget for people who were coming from outside California, so we had to minimize the number of such people. The problem is that some speakers simply cannot attend for $500, since their travel expenses simply cannot be covered for $500. My response to this problem was denial: I just got vague and hoped it would go away. But of course it didn't. Some speakers took losses despite my clear statement of the $500 limit, and I should have been even clearer with them that they should book flights etc right away to ensure that their losses are not greater than they're happy with. The reason I didn't do these things was that I was focused on getting the people to accept our invitations, especially in one case where our first choice declined after weeks of hemming and hawing. (If you're invited to speak at a conference, please decide whether to accept right away.) One thing we did right was to send out a press release. The UCSD PR person wrote it. I thought that the press release, like all of the press coverage, tended to trivialize things with buzzwords like "access to the information superhighway". But I was repeatedly assured that that's how it is: you have to use words that people understand. Anyway, we sent our press release out on PR Newswire, and I mailed it to all of the local computer press. I also mailed it to an eccentric local newspaper that's distributed free in coffee houses, and they reprinted it verbatim. I found that San Diego has all kinds of free publications that I hadn't even heard of, including something called Terminal Velocity that's aimed at the cyberculture and comics crowd -- 40,000 circulation. Not to be sneezed at. One issue was the phone number to use in the press release -- where should people call for more information about the meeting? At first I used the CPSR number in Palo Alto since nobody here wanted to field a million phone calls. But this was a mistake. Lots of people don't want to call long distance, and once I broke down and started listing my own office phone number, I only got a couple dozen calls, including several calls from very interesting people. The only category of calls that bothered me was from people wanting technical help with their computers. Most of these calls were easy enough, since I could send them to local user groups, but one of them was extremely obnoxious. On the whole, being the contact person listed in these publications was a far more positive experience than I thought it would be. Another thing we did right was outreach. This was a principle of the meeting from the beginning. Think of the meeting as primarily an occasion for organizing. Call people on the phone, tell them about the meeting, and ask them who you should be speaking with. At the very beginning of the process, write a small announcement of the meeting and invite people to become involved and sent it out on the net; we got some excellent contacts this way. The Internet may not reach the masses yet, but we found that San Diego now has a pretty reasonable density of Internet penetration among computer people. Announcements about CPSR events here have reached all sorts of interesting people by being passed hand-to-hand through the net. We made dozens of phone calls along the way: computer user groups, Latino organizations, city government, political activists, commercial Internet providers, BBS operators, industry people, and so forth. People have heard about the "info highway", so your job is to get your message boiled down to something that sounds like your interlocutor's next step on their way to the net. Don't try to "sell" your organization or issue to someone who's not interested; rather, if they're already interested in the issues then make the meeting process tangible for them. We visited a number of computer user group meetings; I also called up the organizers of several such meetings and asked if they would be willing to announce the Annual Meeting, and sent them copies of the aforementioned "green sheet" schedule. Early on in the process, I organized a speaker series that Dave Noelle did good publicity for, making posters and sending them to various people and publications. Since the first speaker's topic was privacy, the "Reader" (free weekly tabloid) decided to feature her talk, and their article drew a few dozen people. We also sent the announcements out on the Internet, and each talk had at least a couple dozen people. At the beginning of each talk, I introduced myself and told people about the conference. We sent around a sign-up sheet. We got a bit of a mailing list and some good contacts from that process, but I cannot swear that it was really worth all the effort. Maybe we would have reached those people through other channels. The speaker series was intellectually worthwhile though. The meeting weekend itself was so thoroughly organized, primarily by the local librarians, that it's hard for me to draw any particular lessons besides getting good people to do the work. Typing this now, I can't think of anything that went wrong that's worth telling you about. Oh yes. We got screwed by the student center, whose new management decided that she wasn't interested in honoring the agreement we had made with her predecessor. Of course we didn't have it in writing, because we had been assured that we didn't *need* to have it in writing. After I grouched at her a while, she told us that she would "honor your agreement" by charging us 2.5 times what that agreement had called for. I flipped out and decided that we would move the meeting to an engineering lecture hall that I could book for free because I'm a professor. But hey -- if I wasn't a professor then we could have been shafted. So remember, get it in writing. No matter what conversations you've had with them, they've always got more rules printed on sheets of paper that you've never heard about. You can't enforce your agreements until they're written down. And beware of those extra little charges. We were told that the banquet would cost $X per person, but when the paperwork finally arrived, that turned out to mean $X plus tax and gratuity plus a $400 "facility fee". (I then got this infuriatingly condescending little speech to the effect that this is a standard industry practice -- i.e., everyone does it -- and that I must therefore not know what I'm doing. But setting out to take revenge about such things will probably not serve your real goals.) Get it in writing. In doing the early outreach, I had to learn some lessons. I know that it's good to consult people: call them, visit them, tell them what you're doing, and say "what advice do you have for me?". This makes friends for you and the organization and makes people feel included. It also prevents you from being perceived as grabbing someone else's turf -- that is, claiming sovereignty over an issue that someone else has invested effort identifying themselves with already. Often the people you talk to will actually have good advice for you. (If they have an agenda or an axe then you can usually figure out what it is and steer around it.) Find out who knows people and approach them this way. They don't have to be obvious allies. Even people who specialize in elite networking in your city are perfectly good candidates for this, though you should pick the highest status individual in your organizing group to approach such people. A professor of any rank will do fine. Get rid of your political jargon. Be able to talk to people in language they can understand. Evolve a bunch of honest ways of explaining what the meeting is about. If you cannot come up with an honest way of explaining your meeting to someone then that person is not part of your audience. If they *ought* to be part of your audience then you need to go back and redesign the meeting. Anyway, this cycle of asking advice sometimes became clumsy when I was speaking with someone who wanted to be a speaker at the meeting. It's hard to invite someone to participate in a meeting and simultaneously tell them they can't speak at the meeting. So decide ahead of time which people might want to be speakers, and what you'll say when they explicitly ask you to put them on the program. The standard response is to hide behind your program committee, saying "that would be great, I'll take it up with the program committee". But a lot of people don't buy that. So you won't always end up on perfectly positive terms with people. One way you can be helpful to people is to explicitly invite them to make their organization's (or company's, or whatever) literature available on the conference literature tables. We had several books and journals being advertised, along with several nonprofit Internet providers and local computer organizations. I'm sure we could have had many more if I had gotten those literature invitations out earlier. Anybody who isn't attending your meeting on a corporate expense account will care a lot about how much it costs. Make it cheap. If you work with professional meeting organizers, or people who are accustomed to the world of expense accounts, you will have to resist their seemingly inexorable impulses to make everything "nice" by piling on exotic banquets, racks of A/V equipment, free notebooks for everyone, hotel rooms for speakers, nice little selections of juices and cookies at breaks, and so on. These people mean well, but you will need to bring them back to fiscal reality gently, step by step. Make conscious choices about who should run panels, give opening and closing remarks, introduce speakers, etc. We made good choices, but I wasn't thinking about the issue until very late. If you have any speakers in wheelchairs, plan way ahead for their housing and transportation. Carefully walk the whole path that they will need to travel from curbside to podium, and make extra sure that the necessary doors will be unlocked for handicapped access, including bathrooms. I didn't like the page I wrote about the Annual Meeting for the summer issue of the CPSR Newsletter. I *should* have written an advertisement aimed at turning out the maximum number of CPSR members, most of whom have had rather little personal contact with the organization and really do need to be "sold" on the Annual Meeting, which after all requires a real expenditure of time and money. Instead I wrote a fancy think piece about strategy and gave too much attention about our plans to connect to the local community. I'm glad that we connected to the local community, but that was not the major message to emphasize for people from outside the local community. We put up a WWW page for the Annual Meeting program and registration. It was fun, but I have no idea what difference it made. I *do* know that it's useless to put up a WWW page unless you advertise it by sending messages to various mailing lists. When you're about to choose a date for the meeting, make sure you ask all of the people who know lots of organizations. We had an unfortunate conflict with a AAAS/ABA workshop on cyberspace ethics and law in Washington. Get people together early and brainstorm about the meeting. People have lots of great ideas. Let their ideas influence you so that your thinking is broadened and you're making your decisions more consciously than you might be otherwise. I was glad that we clarified early what jobs the National Office does. They ended up doing some extra jobs, and we ended up doing pieces of some things that I had originally been happy to let them do, but clear assignments of tasks are good. Draw on the experience of the people who have organized the meeting in earlier years. And then when you're done, write down your own experiences to benefit others. - end -