Organizing an International Conference

The first piece of advice one needs to give anybody deliberating the organization of a large international conference is probably not to read columns such as this one and just go ahead and do it. Otherwise, considerably fewer conferences will ever get organized. It takes a certain amount of audacity and trust that things will work out in the end. If the amount of work involved and the scope of problems could be foreseen, many potential organizers might shy away from the task. It is, therefore, crucially important for a conference organizer to recruit a dedicated, enthusiastic, and reliable team of people who are prepared to shoulder the work that an international conference entails. If the work can be carried out as a team effort and if the size of the team adequately reflects the size of the conference—it shouldn’t be larger than absolutely necessary—the organization of a big international conference can be a deeply rewarding experience.

There are basically three types of conferences. The first type comprises those conferences or workshops that are organized on a one-off basis. A researcher or a group of researchers sends out invitations to a range of people who are known to be working in a particular field and who might be interested in presenting their work in an innovative area of research. At the end of the conference or workshop the participants are often asked to submit written versions of their contributions for a collected volume, the conference proceedings. Such conferences occasionally lead to a follow-up conference and thus turn into a conference of the second type. These are informal conferences with a tradition of being organized annually, biennially, or every three years, usually each time run by a new team that sets about organizing the conference and assumes full responsibility both for the academic program and for the finances of the conference. Examples of such conferences are the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) conferences, the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) conferences, and the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) conferences. ICAME and ISLE are organizations with a board and a membership list, while ICEHL is just a series of conferences. In each case, the conferences are run more or less independently by the local organizers. The third type, finally, comprises conferences that are organized by professional organizations, such as the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), or national associations. These organizations rely on local organizers to provide the logistics where the conference takes place, but in each case there is a distribution of responsibilities between the association and the local organizers. The difference between the second and third types of conferences is larger than may appear at first sight—in particular in terms of the freedom for the local organizer, but also in the amount of responsibility, financial and otherwise, that the local organizer has to shoulder. A typical pattern assigns responsibilities for the academic program (selection of plenary speakers, acceptance of submissions, and so on) to the association and responsibilities for the infrastructure (rooms and catering) and for the social program to the local organizers. In this situation it is particularly important to be clear about financial responsibilities. Who applies for funding? Who runs the accounts? Who makes decisions that have financial consequences (remuneration of plenary speakers, for instance)? The boundaries between these three types of conferences are, of course, not watertight, but it is important for potential organizers to be clear about their own position, their own freedom to take decisions, and the extent of their financial liability.

In the following I want to highlight some of the steps that the organizing team of a conference has to think of on the assumption that they are planning a conference of the first two types: that is to say, they are responsible for all aspects of the conference. The choice of an exciting topic for the conference is probably the easiest part of the entire organization process, and sometimes the topic of the conference is already given through the series in which it appears. And the organization has to start early. For a smaller conference it might be possible to organize everything within a year, but for larger conferences two years is probably more typical. Four to six months before the conference, the participants will want to make their travel arrangements, which means that they need to know whether their abstracts have been accepted. In order to allow enough time for the reviewing process, the deadline for submission should probably be some nine months before the conference, and this entails that the first call for papers should go out several months before that in order to give people time to write their abstracts. But the call for papers needs to mention the precise date, information about the costs of the conference, and—if possible—the speakers who will give plenary papers at the conference. Thus two years appears to be a good time to start with the reservation of the venue, to approach possible funding agencies, and to contact possible plenary speakers. In my own experience it is not particularly difficult to get plenary speakers for the conference, once the decision has been taken as to how many can be invited, whether they should be world-famous names, or whether it is more important to cover the main topics of the conference. It might be good to aim for a gender balance and to combine plenary speakers from far away with more local ones. But in the end the choice of these speakers will largely depend on the financial situation of the conference. Will the conference generate enough money through fees and external funding to pay for plenary speakers who have to travel long distances, for instance? It is also advisable to start early to think about the necessary software solutions for the conference. Today there are many software solutions on the market that handle everything from the online submission of abstracts to the assignment of abstracts to reviewers, payment information, the creation of lists of participants, the production of name tags, confirmations of participation, and so on. Some of these software solutions are free, others incur a fee, but the more powerful ones also tend to be more complex and might require considerable IT skills. The most challenging problem may be the integration of a finance module that allows participants to pay online with their credit cards.

The largest source for headaches and sleepless nights for conference organizers is presumably the finances. The local situations will be so different that it is difficult to give general advice, but organizers need to think about as many sources as possible well in advance of the conference. Usually the participants will pay a conference fee, which often differentiates between “early bird” and late fees and often gives concessions to student participants. Universities sometimes sponsor conferences by providing free services (rooms, IT equipment, student helpers, etc.). National science foundations or similar organizations often consider applications for travel expenses for plenary speakers, and the city council may be prepared to pay for a reception. But the availability of these sources very much depends on the local situation. However, one source that should not be forgotten is the publishers who will be happy to present their books to the conference participants, especially in the case of large conferences. Publishers are generally prepared either to pay a modest fee or to donate their books to the local library (which is generous but does not help the financing of the conference). In many cases, publishers can be asked to provide conference bags, lanyards, note pads, pens, and other freebies that conference participants usually expect to get. Publishers can also be asked to pay an extra fee for the inclusion of their fliers or catalogues in the conference pack or for inserting an advertisement in the conference program. In return, publishers expect to be treated well with a suitable room for their book displays in a location that is both central and as close as possible to the location of the coffee breaks. And they appreciate a lockable room where they can safely leave their books overnight.

Apart from booking the venue for the event and thinking about possible sources of funding, it is important to be clear very early on about the process of how submissions are to be assessed. Is there a tradition of accepting all the submissions and putting them into the program? Or will the submissions be reviewed? In recent years, many conferences have started to appoint an international academic advisory board. Such a board enhances the international appeal of the conference, and its members may be called upon to help with the reviewing of the submitted abstracts, which may be either anonymous (contributors do not know who reviewed their abstract) or double-blind. In principle, a double-blind reviewing process, in which the reviewers do not know the authors of the submissions, should guarantee the highest possible quality for the conference because the reviewers will not be influenced by the reputation of the author but will take each submission at its face value. But this procedure entails some considerable and perhaps unexpected dangers, especially in a field in which this kind of procedure is not well established. It appears that sometimes experienced senior researchers who can be relied on to produce excellent presentations at any conference they attend put together their abstracts rather hastily at a time when they have not yet done the research that they want to report on. A double-blind reviewing process takes the risk that the organizers have to ask for revisions of abstracts or even reject them and envisage a conference where some of the established figures in the field are missing. Or they have to accept contributions in spite of a negative assessment by the reviewers. There is no easy solution to this dilemma, but in the case of conference abstracts, sometimes a somewhat broader perspective is required than just the submitted text itself. The quality of an abstract is not always a reliable indicator of the quality of the actual conference presentation.

At many conferences poster presentations have become a regular feature, but they are still seen as a lesser version of a full conference paper presented orally. On the positive side, posters can be seen as an extremely efficient way of getting an overview of what other conference participants are doing with opportunities to talk to the authors of the posters directly, while each regular conference paper usually takes half an hour to attend. On the negative side, conference participants sometimes do not get funding if their contribution is “only” a poster. As a result there is a tendency for conference organizers to relegate weaker submissions to the poster session, thus reinforcing the limited acceptance of posters. There is a vicious circle of limited esteem for the format and reduced concern for the quality of posters by some conference organizers and—it appears—even some poster presenters themselves. It must be stressed, though, that this is true only in some subject areas. In others, such as corpus linguistics or computational linguistics, posters have a long tradition and a much better reputation. In some fields (e.g., literary studies), they are hardly known at all.

Once the decision has been taken as to which papers and which posters are accepted for the conference, the organizers face one of the biggest challenges of their task. They have to come up with a conference program. In an ideal world, the conference is organized in thematically coherent sessions so that participants can attend several papers in a row on topics that interest them, and there are no parallel sessions with thematic overlaps. In the same ideal world, all participants who submit a paper will attend the conference and all of them arrive in time to attend the first scheduled event and all stay long enough to also attend the last event. However, in the real world things will be slightly or perhaps even drastically different. Some participants have to cancel at the last moment, some arrive late, and others leave early. As a general rule, the moment the final program is posted, the conference organizers will hear from a number of participants that they will not be able to make it at the time that has been assigned for them. It is very difficult to assign people to one of the last few slots of the conference. These slots are known as the “graveyard slots” because some of the conference participants will already have left and the danger looms large that a conference paper in such a slot will be attended only by other graveyard-slot presenters because they are the only ones who are forced to stay until the end of the conference. Again, there is no easy solution for this dilemma. If you want to make every participant happy, schedule all of them at the beginning of the conference. They will be happy because they can deliver their papers and then relax for the rest of the conference and enjoy all the other papers. If some die-hard realist interjects that it is not possible to have everybody at the beginning, then tell them that this is the true art of organizing a conference. Make the impossible possible. Or if that fails, try to live with the consequence that we do not live in an ideal world.

It is important to think carefully about the time for the publication of the program. It is advisable to publish a generic program very early on with precise indications about the beginning and the end of the conference, the times of the plenary lectures (if possible), and the times for the social program, such as the conference dinner. People can use this to make their travel plans, but many will wait until the provisional program has been posted. The posting of the program should be done as soon as possible after the decisions on the acceptance of papers have been taken. There will inevitably be changes to this version of the program, presumably up to the last minute, but at this stage of fine-tuning the program, it is essential not to move anybody around in the program without first checking with them. This is time-consuming but unavoidable since many participants make their travel arrangements as soon as they have seen the provisional program, and therefore a shift to another slot in the conference program may no longer be compatible with their travel plans. The “final” program is then published as late as possible. And from this point onward there should be absolutely no shifts in the program. Cancellations may still be unavoidable, but no papers should be moved into vacated slots because of the very real danger that not everybody will be aware of such late changes and they may therefore miss shifted papers.

Once the conference gets under way, a large amount of the work for the organizing team has already been done. If it has been done well, the conference will run smoothly and require only limited intervention from the organizers. The conference office will have to deal with the registrations, photocopying needs, and all sorts of unexpected ailments that might befall some of the conference participants. They will also have to issue confirmations of conference participation. Many universities insist on such documents in order to reimburse travel expenses. So it is a good idea to have such confirmations ready. Some IT helpers will have to deal with computer incompatibilities, misbehaving sound files, and electricity plugs that do not fit the local sockets. Conference participants also will want to get access to the Internet in order to check their email. The international university access system eduroam (see https://www.eduroam.org/) may be a good solution for most participants, but there are always some who need tailor-made solutions because their computers are not set up to connect automatically to eduroam.

After the conference, many conference organizers put together conference proceedings. This provides another large challenge for the organizing team. There are many conference proceedings that contain outstanding papers that have become classics in their field, but generally the reputation of conference proceedings is somewhat limited. Contributions to conference proceedings do not count as much as contributions to other volumes or journal articles. The reason for this may be the impression that papers in conference proceedings are less carefully reviewed and that conference proceedings are not sufficiently coherent in their topics. The only solution to this problem is to avoid the impression of conference proceedings as much as possible and publish a selection of the best papers in a regular, topically coherent volume. This may be difficult because it may entail the rejection of excellent papers that do not fit the chosen topic and the rejection of weak papers even if they are submitted by some of the well-established figures in the field. The volume needs a solid introduction that makes a claim for the coherence of the volume, and it requires a thematic structure to the volume. Arranging the contributions in the alphabetical order of the last name of their authors is not a good idea because it suggests that no other structuring principle could be found and that the contributions perhaps do not have very much topic coherence.

International conferences are vitally important for an academic field because researchers need to occasionally meet face-to-face to get an overview of the most recent developments in the field and to get feedback on their own research efforts from their colleagues around the world. And, therefore, it is important that academics occasionally adopt the role of a conference organizer. However, a prospective organizer may still ask whether it is actually worth all the effort. Are there any rewards at all for this kind of work, or is the time not better invested in writing two or three academic papers instead? From my own experience I can only say that it is indeed worth the effort. An international conference puts the organizing institution on the academic map, and this may help the organizers to enhance their standing in their own university and perhaps get them some additional goodwill from the higher levels in the university administration. It is often possible for graduate students and possibly even undergraduate students of the organizing institution to experience some of the lectures by internationally renowned scholars and thus see the faces that belong to the names they are familiar with from their books. The organizers of a well-run conference will also get the gratitude of the conference participants. But most important the joint effort of the organizing team is a value in itself that can be extremely gratifying for everybody involved.