Advice from a CPSR conference organizer on conferences

["E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>]

	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.

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