Emerging Models for In-Person and Hybrid Conferences

Ithaka S+R, a U.S. research service that offers consulting services to libraries, scholarly societies, and universities, recently published a blog post about The Many Faces of Meetings - A Taxonomy of Emerging Models for In-Person and Hybrid Conferences:

"The pandemic has made it clear that virtual meetings are not only possible, but make conferences more accessible to a broader, and more diverse audience. At the same time, the pandemic has clarified the unique value that in-person meetings offer due to their capacity to leverage physical proximity to promote social engagement, networking, and serendipitous interaction that foster the generation of new ideas. As organizers begin to shift their focus away from the necessarily reactive thinking that has dominated conference planning over the past three years towards strategic thinking about the long-term lessons of pandemic era experimentation with conference formats and modalities, one core question is how to create conferences that combine the most valuable features of in-person and virtual meetings (...)"

"One early area of consensus: the future of scholarly meetings will feature in-person meetings. What is less clear is what those meetings will look like."

The blog post describes the organization's typology of meeting types that combine in-person gatherings and hybrid and virtual meetings:

• Hub and Spoke
• Distributed
• Parallel
• Multidisciplinary Topical Summits
• Seminars
• Fully Hybrid Model
• Fully In-Person Meetings