I think a lot about conference organizing, so it’s unsurprising that I see parallels to conference organizing from other fields. After all, at its core, organizing a conference rhymes with plenty of other endeavors that boil down to providing a stage for presentations and seats for their audience.

I occasionally share links that contain advice not originally targetted toward conference organizers but that I think conference organizers can benefit from. This post collects those links and will be updated periodically as I find others worth sharing.

Table of contents:¹

• “Interest trumps”
• Room size and energy
• More time than is reasonable

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We understood that as axiomatic – that interest trumps – because that’s going to make a better episode.

This quote comes from a video on Adam Savage’s Tested YouTube channel. A presenter will relay their excitement (or lack thereof!) about their topic to their audience. This does not in and of itself spell out a conference organizing rule, but it can inform them – e.g. if your event can only accept one presentation per person but you have two equally good proposals from one person, kicking that decision back to the presenter with “hey, which of these topics are you more excited about?” will often result in the best experience for the presenter, the audience, and the conference as a whole.

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In a video interview on the Cereal At Midnight YouTube channel, the Director of Programming at the Colonial Theatre talks about scheduling showings in theaters of different sizes. I found the whole interview to be interesting and worth a watch / listen, but I wanted to point out a couple of interesting and interconnected factors that go into these decisions:

• How full a room is significantly impacts the energy in that room. For events that have multiple presentation spaces with different attendance capacities, scheduling each space can be difficult. Your goal as an organizer is usually to make the audience best fit the space, which may mean scheduling a talk in a smaller room that feels fuller than it would otherwise. A larger stage is not always the best fit for every talk, especially if the room is (percentage-wise) emptier than the alternative.

• Your schedule reflects your conference’s priorities, which is to say that you and your fellow organizers have opportunities to highlight speakers and topics that you feel warrant more prominent placement (even if those are not the trendiest or most popular topics of the time). Your attendees put their trust in you to shape the event – use that opportunity to introduce them to people and ideas that they may not intentionally seek out. Said another way, curation is important and will not always follow popularity and trends directly.

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Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

This quote comes from an article about Teller, which is very much worth a read². The quote on its own is a pretty powerful statement to me. Maybe this section deserves its own post detailing examples where this is true, but the overarching parallel I want to draw here is that conference organizing takes more time and effort than people realize. And that is by design. Much of the work of running an event happens behind the scenes, including preparing backup plans for inevitable day-of changes. Every conference organizer I’ve talked to about this topic has a story (or several) about dealing with issues inherent to live events. If your event looks seamless to its attendees, and if no one notices all of the things that go wrong and require fixes on the spot, then you have performed a magic trick, the secret of which is usually an unreasonable amount of up-front prep work.