Your description makes me better able to suggest precisely why I think a conference (or a public event of some kind) is necessary. When these conversations stay in the boardroom or the bar or the blog (writing a paper about that now!) there is never any:

1) cross-pollination between generations or levels of hierarchy
Do we really expect that university executives are reading our blogs?

2) public accountability for decisions made. How do we voice our responses to change if we are kept out of the boardroom?

If there is a way to achieve these things without organising a meeting with significant national representation, then I would abandon the idea. I completely welcome more ideas!!

my objection isn’t to the process of organizing conferences in general but rather to the focus of the prospective conference. that is, i’m not too interested in discussing the state of the industry itself (this is what i mean by inside baseball) but i’d rather attend and organize conferences on subjects of political, personal and aesthetic interest and relevance.

my feeling is that the state of the industry type questions are better suited for either the boardroom or the bar (or the blog). real change is already underway (whether from institutions i.e. the Melbourne Model or in our individual classroom practice) and i’m not sure a conference is (although it has many strengths) the right venue.

my experience working on antithesis has been positive and quite instructive and it’s the sort of experience that most or all postgrads should have…

Graham - surprised by this. It sort of suggests that there wouldn’t be much point in ever organising a conference about something you cared about. You’ve been involved in Antithesis, right? I’d be interested to hear how you think the exercises differ, or indeed converge… maybe that’s yr point? Experience tells you the effort isn’t worth it?

I guess the other issue is that the conference itself could be an experiment in what would happen if the labour involved in organising a conference *was* recognised. That is, the CRN is uniquely positioned to employ people for the purpose of bringing other people together. Effectively this means that once the idea is established, the groundwork could be outsourced. Part of the point of the conference is to show how much work is involved behind the scenes in the production of knowledge (and as Laura shows, when this falls in the hands of academics, it can be completely derailing. Um, it’s because we aren’t trained to be conference organisers during our PhD!). Also, universities that want to take the credit for hosting conferences and generating important newsworthy events should be helping out more in terms of providing the infrastructure to make them happen.

Anyway, if it goes ahead, this could be a different kind of conference experiment because there could actually be a clear and (imagine!) equally rewarded split between mental, manual and service labour. Maybe I’m being too optimistic. But that’s what brainstorming is for.

I’ve never dreamed I’d organise a conference before for exactly the reasons Laura writes, but I’m almost at the stage where the topic seems too important for it not to happen. Anyway, it will have to be somewhere outside Brisbane, so I’ll be looking for lots of experienced helpers!

if i can remember to check your blog more often i will try to keep an eye out for how the idea develops.

We generally ask a bunch of 3 or 4 people to speak to a topic for 10 minutes and keep it informal - plenty of time for questions and discussion along the way. Then when we’re sick of sitting still in a seminar room we go to the pub!

You’re right tho. Not everyone wants or needs peer community in this way, or feels comfortable with this model. I haven’t seen many alternatives tho. And people still seem to come.

One thing is I’m not sure how it would fare in a bigger city with more unis. We have trouble getting people outside of the UQ/QUT nexus to come, which says something as well.