We’re coming up on six years of Conference Chats. It’s a slowly-growing community of conference (and other community!) organizers. That growth has be primarily organic. If you’re not familiar with it, this post will be a part introduction, part future plans, and almost entirely a brain dump (with some attempt to keep it scannable).

What is Conference Chats?

A bit of history and context: the group started out without any sort of name or specific plan. Its original version was a calendar invite and video chat link, and there were just a handful of us. There was no real agenda, just a place for some “conference friends”¹ to talk shop². Since then, we’ve met regularly (twice per month these days) and grown quite a bit. We have both async text chat in our chat server and those regularly scheduled video calls, and activity varies, often based on who has an event coming up or a challenge they’ve never run into before.

What we excel at (today)

There are a couple of things the group regularly does very well:

• Being an excellent community. I’ve said this more times than I can count by now, and I’ll continue saying it. The people who participate here are thoughtful, supportive, and dedicated, and I’m lucky to know them.

• “I have just signed up to run a conference, and I have joined today with a list of questions.” This happens now and then, and it’s both effective and rewarding. We have enough experience in the room from organizers of various conferences that most or all of these questions get answered with something along the lines of “I have been in that situation. Here’s what we did, how it worked (or didn’t), and what I might do differently today.” by at least one person. And several people have told me after the fact that this kind of discussion has genuinely solved problems their events would go on to have. I view this as particularly valuable, largely because of the long-tail kinds of questions that are not common or expected enough to end up in a general “how to conference” runbook.

What I hope we will do more of

• Diversify. As I said above, this community has grown largely organically so far and without much in the way of “marketing”. That, and some network effects, mean that we’re pretty heavily skewed toward Python (the programming language) conferences. I think this has worked well, but I intend to do a bit more targeted outreach to organizers that I would like to learn from, collaborate with, and hopefully help out as well. This included communities that are not exclusively tech-focused and not exclusively conferences (what counts as a conference? how long is a piece of string?). I think many communities can benefit from broadening their reach and borrowing from one another, and I think we have a good venue for facilitating that today.

• Market. This one requires balance, of course. But I have heard “I wish I had known about this six months ago” on more than one occasion, and that’s a visibility problem. If the group can help community organizers before they encounter challenges, those organizers and their community members all benefit from that. I’d like for this to be a group that organizers can find before they need to.

• Build structural support. This is the largest open question for me today, and it’s something I expect to have a lot of upside potential. This can take a lot of forms, and I expect it to largely be an ongoing conversation within the community. Some of this exists today in informal ways (e.g. dedicated Discord channels for specific types of questions), some of it may be product and technology reviews, and some of it may be shared resources. I think there are gaps that this community can address, and this is a lot of what’s on my mind right now.

Join us

Did any of this resonate with you? Are you a (prospective) community organizer? Join the chat server, join a call some time, and see if this is a group you’d benefit from or could contribute to. If you have questions about the group before joining, or if you’re not a community organizer but want to make an introduction, feel free to contact me. If you do, let us know what communities you work on, how you found out about the group, and what convinced you to join.