REPLY Separate Professional Conference (SD6291)

[System Dynamics Mailing List]

Posted by  "Jim Hines" <Jim at ventanasystems.com>

Richard Stevenson asks the key question, why separate conferences?  

       a. First, they CAN be separated because they are not meaningfully
synergistic.  The orientation of a professional conference is what's
established in the field; the orientation at an academic conference is
what's new or unusual in the field.  The focus of a professional conference
is taken for granted at an academic conference; and the focus of an academic
conference is at best a side point at a professional conference.  An
attendee at an academic conference wants to build on what is presented.  An
attendee at a professional conference is looking to imitate others or to
hire them as consultants.

For example, an attendee at a professional conference wants to know how to
explain the value of SD to people in her organization, she wants to know how
she can bring an SD viewpoint into her organization and, importantly, who
are the organizations or people who offer assistance.  An attendee at an
academic conference is interested in the latest findings on how humans make
(or fail to make) good judgments, new mathematical techniques for analyzing
system dynamics models, new formulations, and new conclusions about the
dynamics of specific systems of interest (e.g. climate).  

In short, the two conferences are separable because they serve two
different, separable purposes.

     b. The two purposes seem to interfere with eachother.  Certainly my own
experience is that conferences serve one or the other purpose, but not both
-- at least not both well.  My experience is limited, so I'm interested in
others' experience.  In the meantime, it does seem that presentations geared
toward explaining established practice are likely to be viewed by an
academic audience as being either naïve or self-serving.  In the former
case, the academic audience presses the presenters to consider unusual cases
or circumstances, while in the latter case the academic audience simply
views the presenter as being uncouth.  The professional audience in contrast
views the talk as the reverse of naive and asks questions like what other
companies are using this, how much data is required, who owns the model at
the end?  The professional audience understands that the talk is likely to
be self-serving and does not consider that to be bad manners (within
reason).  Similar comments could be made about the two audiences differing
responses to an academic talk, say one about new experimental findings
concerning the psychology of decision making.

    c. A separate professional conference probably would have little impact
on the current conference, and any actual effect might well be beneficial.
For example, the size of the current conference is becoming an issue.  As
the conference size has risen above two hundred to four hundred (and
beyond), the venues in which we can have the conference become increasingly
limited and new people are more likely to feel lost in the crowd.  If a
separate conference siphoned off a few attendees to a more appropriate
conference, that would be a good thing -- helping the academic conference
hang on to its last vestiges of intimacy for a while longer.  Or to take
another example: The current conference tries to satisfy cost-conscious
students as well as business people who require a convenient location and
who are much less cost-sensitive.  The result sometimes is that one or the
other group (or both) is not fully satisfied.  I think cost-conscious people
have been more aggrieved lately; the grievance might be redressed if the
academic conference could focus more on this constituency and less on
another.  
Posted by  "Jim Hines" <Jim at ventanasystems.com>
posting date  Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:39:48 -0500