But here’s my tip for you: conferences aren’t about the sessions, the talks, or the demos, and it doesn’t really matter if you attend the vendor exhibition. Conferences are all about the breaks, the dinners, the bar at the conference hotel after the day’s done.Why? Because the so-called educational aspect of a conference is something you can often receive by simply buying a book or a training DVD. That’s not enough to get me to travel to another city. To me, the most important aspect of attending a conference is the opportunity to meet people that I wouldn’t have otherwise ever met. It’s the random, the chaotic, the unexpected, unplanned discovery.
SocialTwister on August 21st, 2005 at 1:13 pm
The 80-20 Rule of Conferences
For some time now Ive been slowly telling people about the underlying value of conferences and workshops. In having that conversation, Ill often relate to people my 80-20 Rule. It goes something like this: Conferences are: 80% people (the networkin…
Professional-Lurker: Comments by an academic in cyberspace on August 21st, 2005 at 5:03 pm
The value of conference attendence
I ran across this on the SocialTwister blog, a great social informatics blog, in their post the 80-20 Rule of Conferences. Now while I am probably one of those people who would quibble about the percentages, especially for academic conference,&#…
lisinopril on June 20th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
I do this because he has a good point. I also do this because it ties into that “what other people think of MS because of the foolishness that goes on in our courts”.