This is a guest post by C. Thi Nguyen, philosophy professor at the University of Utah
OK, I just survived being Program Chair of the American Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference - a huge, 4-track, 3-day conference that had to go virtual. I didn’t know it was going virtual when I volunteered to head it up, and the entire experience was one long grueling flirtation with disaster. But: it went off with barely a hitch. What I really want to talk about, though, is the surprising success of the experimental social Zoom rooms.
So the ASA Annual has always been my favorite conference. The aesthetics gang is this big, goofy, lovable, amiable family of weirdos. (Who does analytic philosophy... about art? My people, that's who.) And when we realized we had to take it virtual, we thought: we had to do something to recreate that wonderful atmosphere. So Aaron Meskin volunteered to spearhead the effort, and we formed a social idea gang (with Jonathan Weinberg and Andrew Kania) and brainstormed all kinds of experimental ideas.
My guiding observation: big social Zoom rooms full of many strange people are fucking awkward. They're weird; it’s much harder to naturally break into small groups; social chat flows awkwardly. So we tried a bunch of things. First, we ran parallel social sessions, to keep the numbers manageable. (For a 300 person conference, we did 3 parallel social Zoom rooms each night, and ended up with 15-20 people in most rooms.) Second, structure. We had structured activities for most of the Zoom rooms, including:
- Show and Tell Room
- 3 Minute Silly Talk Room
- Talent Show Room
- Joke Room
- Trivia Room
And they worked... insanely well. Tons of people have messaged me saying they were shocked how well those rooms worked, how much community it built, how fun they were. And I suspect that, even though only some of the attendees went to the social rooms, that the spirit from the social rooms carried through the rest of the conference. A lot of the regulars, and a lot of more talkative newcomers, met and commingled and got to know each other, and I think a lot of the spirit carried into the rest of the conference — especially in the chat.
My very favorite was the "3 Minute Silly Talk" room, which I ran with Anne Eaton. Rules were: people just had to make up a talk on some topic - silly, or small, or maybe just float the inchoate beginnings of a new paper. No topic too wild or too small. 3 minutes to talk, enforced with total strictness, followed by 3 minutes of lightning Q&A. And it was... amazing?
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