Watch: The Post-Conference Era with Robert Weisberg

Thanks to all of you who participated in our showcase events last Friday — and special thanks to Robert Weisberg for hosting a fascinating discussion on the future of museum conferences, which brought together conference attendees, presenters, and organizers for a frank discussion of the obstacles to participation associated with traditional conferences, as well as what makes them unique and valuable.

Here’s the recording:

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to retrieve the chat transcript. However, we do have the Miro board, which some participants used during the event to share comments. I’ve copied some of the comments from the canvas below and, if you’d like to read more or if you’ve had some time to think more about the discussion and would like to add new comments, you can do so here.

Changing venues

What might attendees give up if they wanted conferences to be more affordable? In our call, some questioned the value of hotel venues:

One thing I have been wondering about is if conferences need to be held at hotels or are there other (more interesting) venues?

Another (indirectly) responded with their own experience in seeking alternative venues:

A tricky intersection of factors re: hotels as venues is that food/beverage expense (and sometimes AV), plus a minimum number of participant-booked hotel-room nights ("the room block"), are the visible costs that in effect provide a subvention to cover the conference's "free" use of the otherwise costly meeting rooms. Typically the hotel makes its margin on the former parts of the package, and the conference fees then do not have to cover any direct charges for the meeting rooms, etc. Years ago, MCN explored non-hotel venues several times, and it turned out that registration fees actually would have had to be prohibitively higher in order to cover the cost of paying directly for meeting spaces at a museum or university, etc. 🙁

How necessary is the food and beverage part?

People seemed divided on this one, too. I thought one comment summed it up nicely:

Food is expensive, but it also keeps people close.

How might virtual Gatherings create effective boundaries/permission for participants to pause normal work activities?

I asked this question and would love to hear more ideas from readers. Here’s one response from the event that I appreciated:

Not sure how much it worked, but we encouraged participants to set an out of office message and block the conference out on their calendar. I also heard of someone who actually booked a hotel room to attend an online conference just to establish that boundary.

Again, you can view and add more comments to the Miro board here.

As always, reply to this email with your thoughts, leave a comment on the blog, or share your feedback.

Kyle

*Please excuse any errors in the transcription and subtitles. While I do prefer to get professional transcripts and captions to make recordings more accessible, in this case the text is machine-generated.