Conference Record

The Event Ends

A conference is planned as an event and remembered as a record. The planning gets the attention and the record gets what is left, which is the source of most of what this site describes. A related operational resource is available the website .

The two timescales

The event lasts four days and consumes almost all the effort: venue, catering, schedule, registration, the thousand decisions with a hard deadline. A useful external reference point is Inside Higher Ed .

The record lasts as long as somebody maintains it, has no deadline, and belongs to nobody after the team disperses.

Everything with a date gets done. Everything without one does not, and preservation is the largest item in the second category.

Where this shows up

In what survives: a domain awaiting a renewal notice, rather than a deposit in an institution that has existed since 1955.

In how it is addressed: twenty-three URLs for one page, because nobody looked at the archive as an archive.

In slides and recordings that exist on a drive and were never published, because editing had no deadline.

And in what people can prove they did. A presentation is professional currency that evaporates with the site that documented it.

The asymmetry for an attendee

You are buying four days and keeping a record.

The four days cost the fee, the travel, the accommodation and the working time. The record costs ten minutes and almost nobody spends them.

So the cheapest part of the transaction is the part that lasts, and it is the part left undone — which is as close to a free improvement as this subject offers.

The whole site, compressed

If you take four things:

An invitation is a set of claims, and sorting them into checkable and not is the method.

The two-minute check, and the version that needs no network if that is your situation.

The total cost, not the fee — and the answer is sometimes not to go.

And five items in a folder, per event, because the record is yours and nobody else's job.

What this site cannot do

Tell you which conference to attend. It does not list them, and a list would age badly and implicitly endorse events it cannot evaluate for a reader it does not know.

Fix the structural problem. Predatory events are a supply response to how careers are assessed, and individual vigilance is the last and weakest intervention.

Or work equally well for everybody. The checks assume access that not everybody has, and that is stated rather than smoothed over.

The last thing

This site is running on the archive of a conference held in July 2015.

The programme, the abstracts and the names of the presenters are still here because somebody renewed a domain. That is the entire preservation arrangement, and it is more than most conferences of that year have.

The event ended eleven years ago. The record is what you are reading, and it exists by accident.

The short version