Goerend: This Session Should Have Been A Blog Post

Russ Goerend is a teacher, relative of a friend, and self-admitted sneaky reader of this blog. He sent me a nice email the other day to introduce himself and say he was a reader, and as a matter of course I went to check out his blog, which I’m going to follow. And right there, just three posts deep, was a post that nailed something that had been bugging me for the past week.

Last week I attended an industry conference in Kansas City. Attendance at this conference was evenly split between industry members and government representatives who regulate us. The goal of the conference was to address regulations as they relate to product approval and flight testing. My twitter stream indicated my frustration during the conference.

Russ nailed a more productive take on a similar problem in his recent post titled “This session should have been a blog post”. Attending a recent education conference session that was designed as lots of quick informational hits, he noted these thoughts:

The issue with that is that the presentation should have been a blog post (SHBABP). Folks who attend a SHBABP session at a conference are missing out on the chance to go deep with someone at the conference. There are quality sessions at every conference that don’t get the audience they should because of SHBABP sessions. I wrote a post the other day about the apps I use on my phone. No one would have flinched if I had submitted that to a technology conference. I could have projected my phone onto a big screen and spent a minute or two on each app. People would have been furiously scribbling the names of the apps as I went. If I was feeling generous, I could have given people time to ask questions. I didn’t submit it to a conference, though. I wrote it as a post, with links to the app store for each app. It’s more useful as a blog post. There are comments for clarification. And, it saves a space in the conference schedule for meaningful conversation.

Bingo.

Too many of the presentations at my recent conference were informational data dumps that would’ve been great - perhaps even more useful - as well-linked blog posts rather than conference sessions. The best conference sessions were ones that provided more original thought and solid Q&A rather than just doing a 45-minute data dump.

Russ proposes an approach to fix this:

So, the challenge. Conference designers: make it known that you will not schedule sessions that should have been a blog post. Feel free to create and publicize a space or hashtag (go ahead and use #SHBABP!) for all your attendees to add and peruse should have been a blog post “session” links. Explain why you’re doing it. Help people understand why you’re holding the session schedule so dear.

Sadly, in my industry there are a couple problems with this approach: 1) the government doesn’t let their folks, even in key positions, publish official blogs. 2) Most of us in industry play our cards too close to our vest to have helpful blog posts, and would likely have to get them officially vetted in a way that would make them impractical.

Still, if I have the opportunity I will encourage conferences to avoid #SHBABP presentations, and will propose presentations that allow for helpful discussion and content rather than just doing a data dump.