What's in a conference?

Over the course of my career, I've attended over a dozen conferences^[1] in four fields: structural engineering, architecture, software, and geospatial technology. These conferences have varied significantly beyond their subject matter, and determining other factors has been critical for what I've gotten out of attending conferences. The aim of this blog post is to identify and categorize what I've seen and note the differences in motive and execution.

Who Runs the Show

I've attended conferences run by academic organizations, nonprofits, volunteer organizations, and professionals.

Academic Organizations

Academic conferences provide a forum for researchers (mainly PhD students, academic faculty, and maybe a few fringe R&D professionals) to get critical initial feedback on their research. You can expect that the same names will appear every year, as advisors will target the same conferences based on which committees/orgs they themselves are involved in. Most of the academic conferences I attended were large, with up to a dozen concurrent tracks, which can honestly make it difficult to find a good audience if you're giving a talk. These conferences will likely have a lot of committee meetings as well, but they usually occur before the conference, so if you want to get involved, that means stretching your travel time to an extent that your organization or employer may not pay for (and you might not be able to join the committee meetings anyway). There might be a tight-knit supportive community within a specific research area, but my experience was that these conferences were pretty cutthroat.

Professionals

Professional conferences are about publicity, networking, and selling. You can expect that the papers (if they exist) will be surface-level on technical content. You're also likely to see "confidential" presentations that serve more as teasers, or product demonstrations and vendor exhibitions. These events are a good opportunity for competitive intelligence gathering, career networking, and hearing about industry trends (spoiler alert, AI everywhere these days). These conferences are also more likely to be multidisciplinary to maximize business development opportunities. Depending on the field, there might also be committee meetings that are valuable for building your career, but again, there might be gatekeeping on joining or attending them based on your professional level and affiliation.

Volunteer/Nonprofits

These conferences exist somewhere between academic rigor and practical application. The main aim is knowledge transfer and skill development, and its likely that the talks are recorded and published online later. This feature allows the "hallway track" to exist, since you know you'll see the presentations online later and can instead spend valuable in person time chatting with other conference goers, and doing some of the miscellaneous conference features I note below^[2]. There's a significant element of community engagement, and these conferences can be just as well run (if not better run) than academic or professional conferences.

So You Want To Present

In my experience, the criteria for academic and professional conferences was about who you know/your professional affiliation (institute or company). Some academic conferences are blind submittal, but often your field is small enough and people know each other's research that it's not really blind. Professional conference submittals often aren't blind at all. Depending on the professional conference, there won't be a submittal process (talks are explicitly solicited from select individuals by the organizer), or the submittal process will ask who you work for and which committee you're on.

The more progressive conferences I've either attended or presented at not only had a blind submittal process, they also solicited for papers/projects from first time attendees and disadvantaged groups. There were also often grants for those selected to attend and participate. These orgs were much more likely to have transparent selection criteria, and in some cases, the conference abstracts were put to a popular vote as part of the selection process.

What's The Cost

Every single software and technology conference (professional or volunteer/nonprofit) that I have attended has been vastly cheaper than any of the ones I participated in on the built environment side. I think the most expensive conference I've attended on the software side capped out at $500 a ticket; the average built environment side conference cost starts at $1000, not including galas, receptions, or workshops/hackathons.

While I know there were deep pocket corporate sponsors at some of the conferences I've been to, it certainly hasn't been the case for at least three I've attended, so I'm still scratching my head where that delta comes from. Is it that the expectation in the built environment, those attending will be principals/higher up enough that costs are drop in the bucket for business development? If that's the case, where does that leave those starting their careers, often with no professional development budget to build what they're told will be the critical connections for their careers? I was fortunate to attend one conference on a scholarship, but with ~15 scholarship recipients out of 1000+ attendees, and thousands of graduates entering the professional each year, that's hardly a sustainable model for bringing early career people into the fold.