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Attending a professional conference is expensive. Registration fees are typically several hundred dollars. And this is only a small part of the total cost. A conference in Europe, for example, for a US participant, often costs nearly $3000. Furthermore, conferences are not as effective as they could be. Most of the time is usually spent on passive listening to presentations rather than discussing previously-read reports.
How can the situation be improved? This question is answered in a recently published Letter to the Editor (Physics Today, September 2010, page 10). The title is "Forging more effective science conferences;" the author is Ludwik Kowalski (myself). Here is a brief summary.
1) A conference should have a website. Make all presentations available on-line, not later than two weeks before the conference.
2) Organize preliminary discussion of presentations, at the conference website, as soon as they are posted.
3) Reduce duration of oral presentations. For a typical 30-minute presentation, for example, 5 minutes could be allocated for a summary and the remaining time could be used for questions and discussion.
What are the advantages of such an approach?
a) Participants will have time to think and discuss the content prior to the conference.
b) Most of the conference time will be spent on active participation, rather than on passive listening.
c) Some controversial issues might be resolved before the conference; only the remaining issues would be addressed.
d) Those who cannot afford to attend the conference would still be able to read the reports, and to participate in pre-conference debates.
P.S.
You might also be interested in my FREE ON-LINE books;the titles and the links are shown below.
1) 'Hell on Earth: Brutality and Violence Under the Stalinist regime.'
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/father2/introduction.html
2) 'Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality.'
