Ten tips for tech conference attendees
2009 October 15
OK, I think I’m going with the Philips dawn simulator. I’ll post a review when it arrives.
In other news, the topic of advice for getting the most out of tech conferences came up today, and I thought I’d post my tips.
- Don’t attend sessions with your specialisation in the title. If you do, you’ll be bored and sit there second-guessing the speaker and wanting to interject with stuff you know. Instead, go to a session on something you’ve never heard of, and learn something new. (I heard this one at SXSW and I wish I’d listened properly.)
- If you feel obligated to attend a session (for your work, in particular) but it breaks the preceding rule, make a point of grabbing a meal or a drink with the speaker and asking them about their work instead of actually going to the talk. You’ll quickly learn enough to cover any sense of obligation, and quite likely get more directly useful information than you would in the session itself.
- If you have trouble balancing sessions with hallway track, set yourself goals. For me in my current role (which is heavy on the networking), I attempt to attend actual sessions for about 1/3 of the slots, which means 2-3 sessions a day.
- If you’re a speaker, try and eat lunch with non-speakers. Someone (I forget who) articulated this rule wrt OSCON, saying that you should look at the lunch tables and avoid sitting at one that already has two or more speaker nametags sitting there. Let’s face it, the speaker circuit can be a bit cliquey, and it’s good for everyone if we spread out a bit.
- Figure out how many hours a day you can spend “on”, and schedule downtime around that. For me, that often means skipping early morning sessions to do work from my hotel room, or taking a “disco nap” before the evening festivities if my hotel room is close enough.
- Try to live-blog at least one session that you find interesting. Take notes as fast as you can during the session, clean them up quickly (adding links for any people/tools/websites mentioned), and post them within say half an hour. Tweet/dent about it and let people know (especially the speaker), and they will love you for it.
- On the subject of blogging, try to post a couple of particularly interesting things on your blog in the weeks or days before the conference, so that when people go look at your site they find something worthwhile there. If you’ve got things you want to talk to people about at the conference (such as a new software release), that’s an ideal topic to post about. (I’m crap at this, but I still recommend it.)
- Carry a personal business card with your name and email address and whatever other information you want on it, separate from your work business card. If you get chatting to someone about a topic that’s not work related and want to stay in touch, it can be a bit weird to give them a card with your employer’s details on it. (Note to self: get some new cards.)
- Fold a copy of the printed schedule and slip it into your nametag holder, along with a few business cards. Trust me, the gain in efficiency from not having to dig into your bag is surprisingly high.
- If you have trouble striking up conversations, wear something outrageous. Whether it’s a particularly cool tshirt (not Threadless — everyone has those) or a pirate hat like Paul Fenwick’s, or brightly coloured hair, it will make people want to talk with you and help them remember you afterwards.
I’ve tried to skip all the really obvious stuff like “drink water” and “carry snacks” and “wear comfortable shoes”, which you can find anywhere. But if you’ve got any other conference tips, especially some that are a little less commonplace, add them in comments!
The part I missed about “carry snacks” is “carry snacks *even when you’ve been promised a full meal*.”
Some conferences (not enough) come with handily sized minischedules that conveniently let you have one day’s worth of events visible though your nametag slip.
It’s partly because my laptop is heavy, but I find having a laptop with me a mixed blessing. It means I can blog or tweet or get the inside deal on lunch, but it means worrying about charge and theft. I don’t have a PDA or smartphone, but that could be an option. Consider how many times a day you really need to check your email.
The ubiquitous conference SLR can be skipped: bulky. A smaller camera may not be worth bothering with either: lighting in most talks is too dim for them, and photos of people eating lunch aren’t very interesting. Carry a card reader if you’re worried someone will get a great photo of your talk or something, and ask them if you can copy the images.
I’m interested in tips for people who don’t have a network of people at the conference, I guess some are:
Prior research, you can start with the speakers and figure out who their colleagues are via Planets or blogrolls or mailing lists. Then you know what names you’re keeping an eye out for.
Volunteering is a mixed blessing: some tech conferences ride their volunteers hard and you may not get to much of the conference. But if there is pre-conference volunteering (like bag packing, shuttling gear around), that’s probably useful for getting an elementary network in place.
There are a bunch of tradeoffs with accommodation in terms of expense, your travelling companions, noise etc, but staying within a few blocks of where everyone else is staying will maximise your ability to do things after hours and to get your disco naps in.
Mary, my tip for people without a network is to look for smaller events/activities where you’re more likely to get some one-on-one interaction.
* At SXSW, I discovered far too late that these were the “Core Conversations” talks — why wasn’t that explained somewhere obvious on the schedule?
* Many events have BarCamps or WhateverCamps running either just before or simultaneously with the event, where there are likely to be small group conversations rather than huge lecture theatres.
* At OSCON, the Community Leadership Summit held on the previous weekend was a great way to meet a few people before the hugeness of the main show — somewhere around 100-150 people rather than thousands.
* At one non-work-related convention I went to there was a “newbies dinner” on the night before the proceedings really started, where I went and met not only newbies, but a handful of welcoming people who’d attended before and were helping ease us into it.
* If your travel plans allow it, see if there are any relevants meetups or user group meetings in the week preceding the conference. If you’re speaking at the conference, that might even give you the chance to do a practice run with a smaller group, and they’ll appreciate getting an out-of-town speaker.
* See if the event has opportunities for room-sharing or carpooling, and put your name down for them if it makes sense. That way you’ll know at least one other person from the very start.
Watching twitter hashtags, blog search feeds, mailing lists, or wikis associated with the event can be a vital way to find out about any of the above and even to start to know some other people who’ll be attending. Ideally you’d start watching at least a month ahead of time, but you can still get useful tips right up to and even during the conference.
- Carry something you can take notes with/on, even in addition to a PDA or laptop.
- Take your time. It’s better to see more of less and actually learn something than to skim the whole thing.
- Plan what you want to see/attend and figure out early where it is physically located.
- Never ever get into a heated argument. Ever.
This is good stuff. I really need to follow some of this advice more often, especially the stuff about which talks to go to. (I am still shy about approaching speakers whose talks I didn’t see, figuring they will have lots of people who want to talk to them and I’ll just be asking them about things they already talked about. Which is ridiculous, because when I *am* a speaker I want to know that people care and are interested and I don’t mind making time to talk to people, even to answer the same questions over and over again!)
Mary: I find that I always bring my pocket camera — even if I don’t use it, I hate worrying that there will be things I want to take pictures of and can’t. (Hey, some lunch photos are fun!) But I am pretty much always carrying my backpack with me anyway, everywhere. Also, if I get a photo of something interesting, other people will approach me to ask about photos, which I like since I hate to do the approaching myself!
Also, definitely agree with bringing snacks even if you’re promised a meal — either the food is unsuitable (I can’t stand mayonnaise), or you end up going off talking to people during the break, or you have something you need to get done and the meal break is the only time to do it…
It also took me a while to figure out that it was OK to spend a lot of time in the “hallway track”, that it wasn’t a waste to go to a conference and miss a bunch of sessions.
Where I don’t know anyone I’ve had good results finding out who my friends’ friends are and striking up conversation with them.
You may also like this exchange between Asheesh Laroia and me: what makes for a good time at a conference:
http://www.asheesh.org/note/software/packaging.html
http://www.asheesh.org/note/people/great-time.html
What a great bunch of tips! I take notes in T9 on my oldschool prepaid Tmobile phone (a Samsung SH\GH-T639), either right in the notes editor, or I log in to my gmail and send myself longer messages. I realize a lot of people can’t type in T9 at 120wpm or more…but it IS very handy! Also makes for not much to carry, an issue for me cuz I had a neck injury and just had surgery earlier this year…I try to carry as little as possible.
I’m Vlogging at LISA this year…if you see me, come talk to me! I love to ask and answer questions. I’ll be asking questions of a lot of presenters at LISA, and posting the answers in my blog at USENIX. If there’s a session you can’t make but you want to ask questions on, stop me – I’ll ask for ya!
—p
Twitter. And not only twitter yourself, but keep a window open to search.twitter.com/#conference-hashtag and watch what other people are saying. Respond to them. Make new friends.
I always bring a six power strip or something similar. At tech conferences, people bring so many things that need to be charged and we’re usually strapped with two outlets! You become instantly popular because you had this genius idea to pack a power strip. Before you know it, people are congregating around you and pretty soon they’ll be carrying you on their shoulders. OK, that might a stretch, but it makes it easy for people to approach you!
–ed