Hosting a Conference

One more post about Astricon – it must have been a piece of good conference – that’s another one inspired by the event. It wasn’t perfect however – I’ll let myself to moan a bit about the conference today.

During the first day air-condition was broken. Tiny little thing, you can say, but when you have a room full of people and no ventilation, temperature quickly becomes unpleasant and your nose doesn’t like coming back to the place after a brake (guess why). Quick fix was opening a door to balcony. Unfortunately conference place was very close to the airport and speaker voice was deadened by landing aircraft. Finally, there was a man who was closing the door when the aircraft was coming and opening it back after the jet landed. I know that broken air-condition is something hard to address in a few minutes, but today it’s the day of grumbling.

Another day air-condition worked almost perfectly. It just stacked on freeze setting. During breaks everyone was running out from the conference room whispering: “warm... at last...” That should be under control of hosts. It’s important to remember about all those annoying details, because they distract audience’s attention from the speaker and things he’s trying to teach. Even David Duffet during his great presentation had some interruptions with audience thinking if the door-operator would manage to close the door before another jet would pass by windows.

Host made, quite a good job with announcing speakers, but no one was gathering attendees lingering in a hall after breaks. OK, attendees should come on time to the conference room, but they never do. There should be someone “inviting” all the folks to presentations. In other case there will be bunch of people coming late, looking for colleagues’ places, crowding through the room and of course distracting everyone from whatever speaker is trying to sell. To be honest I was the one of those “distracters” a couple of times, so I am the one to blame.

First presentation started with 30-minute delay because of “technical issues”. I bet it was speaker who was either late or unprepared. A false start. After a quarter people took this unplanned break to have yet another coffee, make last very important call and so on. They came back late and the presentation was interrupted few times. The speaker had harder task to complete when trying to show us what he intended to.

The best thing you can do as a host of the conference is to provide the best environment to present with the lowest possible number of interruptions, which distract the audience, and make it harder for speaker to... you know what. Eliminate unnecessary noise, silence, warm, cold and mess. Force the audience to be in the room on time. Force the presenter to be in the room on time and to be ready to start. If possible arrange the conference room in a way that leaves door in the back (laggards won’t enter facing whole audience) and with some place behind the last row of chairs (laggards won’t march between the speaker and the audience when looking for their seat). And keep your fingers crossed for air-condition.

After all those moaning I’ll repeat – Astricon was a piece of good job. Not every presentation was superbly interesting, but that’s rather impossible. I learnt a lot during the event, so the money was spent well.