Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The conferences are cancelled this year. Will we miss them? Really?

I suppose that 2020 will be remembered as the year of the coronavirus. Right or wrong, and we may never know if we were right or wrong in all this, people stayed home. We hid from mass gatherings—I didn’t know that was a real medical term—and worked from home.

This was the year that I was to attend eight or ten conferences. Well, I was to attend them. Most were cancelled. Travel was “banned” at work. Sigh.

Now we should ask the inevitable question about all these cancelled conferences: were they worth the expense anyways?

“The real value of conferences comes from the informal chats, those serendipitous moments in the hallways and at lunch.”—A conference sponsor and a die-hard conference attender.

Well, if the above is true, we should see a downtown in industries that cancelled all their conferences. Right? This will hit us partly this year and surely in the next two years. Right?

What if we don’t see this downtown? Maybe all those conferences were just excuses to get out of the office. Nice travel and nice parties, huh? If we reach this conclusion, will conferences shrink back to the days when the economy wasn’t booming? Will 2019 be the peak of the conference world?

Time will tell, maybe.