It was suggested on a lively Daily Nous discussion that it would be helpful to have blogpost on how to organize a philosophy conference or workshop for those who have never done so. Organizing a conference or workshop is immensely rewarding and fun (I've organized and co-organized seven of them, and been indirectly involved in more), but it is also very time-consuming and requires careful planning.
Thanks to a.o. Rachel McKinnon, Marije Martijn, Kate Norlock, and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke for suggestions. Other tips & tricks are welcome in the comments!
1. Think about what you want to achieve
Thinking carefully about your aims can save you headache later on and help you to plan this better. Do you want it for research reasons, to get input on a line of inquiry you're just beginning? For your tenure dossier, in order to show some organizational activity? Do you plan proceedings (see below)?
You need at least 1.5 years from the initial concept to actual event to get a relatively small-scale conference or workshop planned out. Choose a topic that you are working on and that is still relatively fresh so that the conference makes a genuine impact in the field. You can organize a conference with a narrow, highly-specified topic, you can do something broad and open-ended. Both narrow- and broad-scope topics have their advantages: a narrow-topic conference provides a forum for specialists to discuss unpublished work and exchange ideas in-depth; a broad-topic conference can expose participants to ideas they normally wouldn't be confronted with, which can lead to interesting cross-fertilization.
2. Think of a format
Here are a few ways to organize your conference (there are many others – you can be creative):
- Multi-day conference This typically involves a few invited speakers who have talks/Q&A sessions of about 1-1.5 hour each, and several sessions of contributed papers (of about 30-40 mins each): Typically complex to organize, good as a way to explore a relatively new research topic.
- Focused workshop This tends to involve discussion of pre-read full papers with invited speakers and commenters who have prepared a careful response: good for specialized, narrow topics, gives a lot of in-depth discussion.
- Graduate workshop A workshop where grad students and other early career people can test out their ideas for an audience mostly consisting of peers.
- Summer school A workshop for a large audience, consisting of only invited speakers, who provide accessible talks about a given topic.
3. Obtaining funding
Once you've settled on a topic and format, you need to think about funding. Costs include catering, renting one or several lecture theaters at your institution, accessibility requirements (see below), and maybe some social events such as a conference dinner or city tour. However, the biggest costs are accommodation and airfare of invited speakers (see also 4). Try to get a rough ballpark figure. Here are some sources of funding
- Department: For small events with local or just one international invited speakers, your department may provide sufficient funding.
- Other academics: You can team up with others (even from different departments) to pool funding from your departments together – something I've done in the past and that also helps with the workload (see 4).
- Grant: You can apply for a grant to fund your workshop, next to some other things like research money or teaching relief. Even a small grant provides a substantial amount, so it gives a lot of freedom in format, number of invited speakers, etc. However, grants are extremely competitive, and it takes a while to get a decision on your grant application (typically 9 months to a year), so you need to take that into account in the timeline (at least 2 years from the moment of submitting the proposal to the organization of the conference).
4. Find collaborators
Organizing a conference is a lot of work – a herculean task to perform on your own. Enlist the following:
- Local organizing committee: If you have people at your institution (or a nearby institution) who are interested in the topic, see if you can get them on board. This will help your workload and make it more fun! Two or three dedicated people beside yourself is an ideal number.
- Reviewers for open call for abstracts or papers: If you have an open call for papers, you will also need a board of reviewers (three people next to yourself suffice) to read the anonymized submissions. Typically, reviewers provide a score for the fit of each abstract/paper for the conference, and for its quality. These people should be experts on the topic of the conference, not necessarily people at your institution.
- Chairs, respondents, etc.: find local people, such as graduate students, who can chair discussions, respond to papers etc. [note: one commenter on FB suggested graduate students may lack the necessary firmness to be chair]
- Co-editors if you want to do a special issue or edited volume. It's a pain to edit something by yourself!
5. Invite the plenary speakers
Since this is an element you have under control – unlike the unsolicited submissions – you need to put a lot of thought into whom to invite, as they will shape the event, as well as provide incentives for people to attend or submit a paper.
- When to invite: Invite speakers well on beforehand (at least 9 months to a year), before the event. You need longer notice for more established people, especially senior women, who get asked a lot. Leaving enough notice increases the chance they will accept.
- Whom to invite: You should invite people you believe will be beneficial for the goals of the conference. Sometimes these will be senior, prominent philosophers, sometimes they can be junior. Sometimes senior people decline but suggest other potential speakers (typical more junior). I've had this twice, and twice followed a suggestion. In both cases was very pleased with the person they suggested. For speakers, you don't need to be restricted to your network; looking at PhilPapers might give you inspiration about who wrote what on a recent topic. [update based on one of the comments below] To help increase diversity among speakers, the UPDirectory (http://www.theupdirectory.com/) is a useful resource.
- Publication plans: When you invite speakers and plan to make a volume or special issue, (see below), it helps if you explicitly don't commit them to writing for it, since this will decrease the chance they'll accept, e.g., "We plan to publish selected papers from the conference in a special issue, but your giving a talk in no way commits you to submit a paper for the conference".
- How much they cost: Normally, invited speakers expect their travel and accommodation to be refunded. Sometimes there is a honorarium (usually a modest amount, a couple of hundred dollars), but this does not seem the norm.The cost of airfare and accommodation should not be underestimated. If I want someone from the US to speak at my workshop or conference here in Amsterdam, it will cost me easily 1500-2000 dollars to fly them over, pay their hotel, and do some social event (such as a conference dinner). If you know that someone who is a specialist on your topic of choice happens to be nearby (e.g., attending another conference), you might be able to get them without enormous expense (e.g., just paying a local train ticket and hotel instead of international airfare).
6. Fix the date
When you invite speakers, you'll also be able to fix the date. Look when would be a good time for you and the co-organizers, avoid any dates that conflict with recurring conferences in the subject area (e.g., say the conference is in philosophy of cognitive science, avoid it happening when the Annual Meeting for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology occurs). You can be a bit flexible to allow for plenary speakers' schedules, especially if you have only one or two of them (communicate this explicitly to increase the chance they'll be able to accept).
7. Design a call for papers/abstracts
If your conference will have a call for papers/abstracts, design it when you invite the plenary speakers (you can send them a draft), and finalize it once you can put their names on the call for papers or abstracts. If you only ask abstracts, it's a call for abstracts (CFA); if you ask full papers, it's a call for papers (CFP). In my experience, extended abstracts (typically around 1000 words) or full papers provide (around 3000 words) provide more information about the quality of a submission than shorter abstracts (250-500 words), but you end up with fewer submissions. So it's a tradeoff.
It is helpful to provide a non-exhaustive list of possible topics. Specify word count, deadline, and format for submission. Explicitly ask for anonymized papers/abstracts, otherwise it won't happen, and it's a bother to have to ask someone to anonymize them for you. Again, do this well in advance, aiming for at least 6-12 months before the conference start date for the first CFP/CFA to allow for the review process and enough time for attendants to request funding, book tickets, etc. Advertise widely on places such as Philos-L and more specialized lists.
For the submissions themselves, I know people using online systems for this such as EasyChair for this, but personally, I find it easy to just ask authors to send anonymized papers to me or to an e-mail address (gmail or similar) created for the conference. This way, communication for the conference does not go missing and is nicely contained.
8. Advertising
You can advertise the event on PhilEvents, and ask your department's IT support to create a simple webpage. If they do not do this, PhilEvents is quite sophisticated and customizable, or you could just create a temporary webpage through google, tumblr, wordpress. Once the website is up and running, you can advertise the call for abstracts/papers.
9. Practical organization of the event
- The nitty-gritty details: Once you've advertised the event and the submissions are coming in, you need start renting the venue, looking at catering, if applicable, finding a conference dinner location and booking it, booking the invited speakers' airfare and hotels (even though administrators help you, it is still a surprising amount of work). Invite people to chair (e.g., people who attend the conference but who aren't presenting, local graduate students and faculty). Contact hotels, or see if your university has a deal with nearby hotels for favorable rates. If so, mention these to your participants.
- Accessibility: The event should take place in a location that is easily accessible by wheelchair and by people with limited mobility (e.g., not the charming library on top of the several flights of narrow stairs). Sending an e-mail asking participants to let you know about any accessibility issues, dietary requirements etc makes life easier for everyone. Also, look up babysitting services in the neighborhood to let people know about options for childcare (often it's alas too expensive or impossible to arrange at the conference).
- Financial barriers to participants: try to make sure lack of funding is no barrier to participation. When planning a grant, you could include a few travel grants for non-tenure track faculty or graduate students. Consider lower fees for poorer participants. Graduate students are not the only attendants who face financial hurdles to participation – adjuncts, postdocs, people without academic affiliation, or even professors from small cash-strapped schools will not be able to attend if your conference costs hundreds of dollars. Making the conference inexpensive makes it more inclusive. Expensive events (e.g., conference dinners at expensive restaurants) also create barriers – avoid them. Some people I've discussed this with on FB suggested Skype as a possibility for people to present work if they are unable (financially or otherwise) to do so in person.
10. Design the program [update, thanks to comments on FB]
- Schedule a draft program, to be circulated to participants in advance to make sure they can make it on their allotted time slot (the larger the conference, the harder it is to accommodate everyone), still it is good practice to ask participants if they can make it (e.g., an invited speaker could not use a microphone on Saturday for reasons of religious observance and thus could not give his talk on a Saturday)
- Be very clear to participants how much time they should leave for Q&A (e.g., you have 40 minutes in total, and you should leave at least 15 minutes for the Q&A), and ask chairs to be strict about this time limit. Long Q&A sessions are better than short ones.
- Make sure there are plenty of breaks, ideally a short break after each lecture, and that coffee breaks take long enough. 15 mins is too short for a coffee break; 30 minutes is better.
- Schedule one or more social events where students, invited speakers, and others can mingle. Choose a venue that is conducive to this, so not a very expensive restaurant, or a loud bar
- If you have parallel sessions (which are a headache to organize!) make sure that sessions on similar topics do not overlap
- Have a chairing policy and make sure chairs stick to it. Good practices are: only one question per asker per turn, not taking questions in order they are asked but taking a more geographic approach (I've found that if Q&A is first come, first serve), everyone just puts up their hand to make sure they got a place in the queue. This makes the Q&A inflexible and does not lead to the best discussions).
11. The event itself
…If you're the organizer this goes by in a daze. You'll be exhausted at the end and will find you need to be in 2-3 places at the same time. Don't forget to give a cell phone number and expect to be reachable at all times. Try to enjoy yourself, nonetheless, and soak in all the amazing contributions!
12. Getting the proceedings published
If it is important for you to get a volume or a special issue out of this, you need to plan it early (think early stages). For instance, prominent invited speakers make it easier to find a venue, so you then need to aim for prominent speakers, or a mix of prominent and upcoming speakers. Also, you need to specify that you intend to make a volume when sending out the CFP/CFA.
However, note that it is not easy to obtain journal space, and even more difficult to have conference proceedings published with a reputable publisher – academic publishers seem to prefer, in this order: textbooks or handbooks that can be used in undergraduate teaching, monographs, and only then edited collections. I know people who did not manage to find a satisfactory publisher in spite of an excellent lineup and interesting topic. Younger publishing houses will sometimes contact you (the organizer) with the offer to publish your proceedings. One needs to tread carefully: Many of these are predatory. Some are not but very obscure so the CV value of the proceedings is not high, and it is comparably a lot of work to edit a volume. Alternatively, you can wait and see if (especially if most contributions are unsolicited) if there is enough coherence and topicality to warrant a special issue. My experience is, if you do not plan this in well advance, it usually does not happen.
Long post – much more can be said, but hopefully this provides you with a guide on how to begin.
Addendum – here are some helpful links to make an accessible conference by Shelley Tremain (see also comment section:
The Aesthetics of Accessibility (and see the comments)
Universal Design for Instructors: (includes information about presentations, accessible powerpoint presentations, etc.)
Building University-Wide IT Accessibility
Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Zara Bain: (includes links to sites on organizing an accessible conference, including discussion of why conference organizers should not expect disabled philosophers to send conference organizers a “simple email” to find out about accessibility)
Accessibility Guidelines for Websites: (every conference has a website)
New Resource Guide for Accessible Meetings, Events, and Conferences
Inclusive Chairing: ([Tremain] wrote a long comment on this post)
Article on Chronicle Vitae: Removing the Barriers to Participation for Disabled Scholars
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