Charu Jangid
Published Feb 5, 2016
Hi. My name is Charu and I'm a serial conference attendee. It’s probably a better addiction to have than some others. My conference-ing journey started two years ago with the World Business Dialogue, which was such a fantastic experience, that I had to repeat it.
Initially, the goal was travel. When I signed up for WBD, I was excited at the prospect of visiting countries in Europe I hadn’t been to before. More recently, I have found myself attending conferences in the same location (the San Francisco Bay Area). Over time I have found myself trying to optimize on meaningful connections.
Broadly, there are three interesting things about conferences: the location, the topic and the people. I have found that the experiences I enjoy the most occur when there is an intersection between an interesting topic and the right people. From my experiences in the past year, the conferences I remember and reminisce about were OpenAir, which was themed around machine learning, and Asia Pacific Week which focused on political relations between Asia-Pacific countries and the Western world. Neither were in a super exciting location (APW took place in Canberra, which is Australia’s answer to Ottawa). However, both had highly legitimate speakers who were experts in their field, and an audience that was at least curious, if not passionate about the topic.
Extrapolating further, the conferences I have enjoyed lesser have had more generic themes. Generic themes tend to attract a diverse group of people, in which it can be harder to find your tribe. I have yet to see a generically-themed conference which does a great job of creating meaningful conversations between attendees, especially those who haven't met before. For several of these conferences, the purpose is to network and make new connections. However, when the sole purpose of an event is networking, I’ve found that in reality it becomes hard to really meaningfully connect. My hypothesis is that better networking takes place when the event has a purpose/topic, and the subsequent conversations around it make for a more meaningful way to learn about the people you meet. This could also be based on just my personal preferences.
Do you attend a lot of conferences? How do you form meaningful connections?
This was originally posted on my blog bitsandquarks.com where I ramble occasionally about life, technology, pop culture and more.