Conferences: Face Time With Real People is More Important Than Ever

By Jill Kuraitis, 6-12-09

Back in the day – from the dinosaurs to about the 1990s – business conferences were often boondoggles designed partly as tax-deductible vacations, client-flattering golf weekends, or perks for valued employees.

The modern business conference is something different. Budgets – and time - are tight, the internet provides its web of networking and communicating, and the recession has done away with just-moseying-along business practices.  Environmental factors are demanding business solutions that must be accomplished in record time.  It’s an intense business world during this recession.

It can also be an isolating world, lacking in human interaction and real-time alliances and friendships. So much is done in front of a screen that face time with people can feel unusual.

Conferences are bringing professionals together for education and inspiration, of course, but also for access to people. You may meet industry stars, but it could be the young innovator who gives you a shot in the arm.  Coming face-to-face with people you’ve known for years through email will help build a camaraderie that is different than before meeting. Getting immediate answers to your business problems by having coffee with that one guy you’ve always admired from that one company can move your thinking ahead in a way that email can’t duplicate. And there is an after-the-conference effect which is hard to explain, but feeling more involved in your industry than before is one way of saying it.

And there is a lot to be said for a shared sense of purpose.

Next week NewWest.Net is producing and hosting another of our conference series called Planning in the West that promises face time with inspiring leaders and innovators who are designers, developers, architects, transportation and urban and rural planners.

Wednesday afternoon, we’ll take conference guests on their choice of Boise tours - “Urban Streetscapes: Art and Architectural as Cultural Heritage”; “Infill and Mixed Use Revisited,” a tour of new and old developments; or “Beyond the Ivory Tower: How Campuses Can Lead the Sustainability Way.”

Thursday is a series of speakers, panels and discussions with planners from throughout the West.

From our other conferences we know that people who attend get intensely involved in the subject and form bonds that have achieved results – a citizens’ group collaborating with a city government on a planning project, for example. Staff at NewWest.Net have more relationships with the people who are moving and shaking the world of our growing region – the people who show us “how the west is one” – which is one of our continuing themes as we cover the news of the Rocky Mountain region.

From NewWest.Net founder and CEO Jonathan Weber: “The economic downturn has, for the moment, tempered the heavy pressure of rapid growth. Many a new “planned community” is stalled or worse, and encouraging thoughtful development seems less urgent when there isn’t a lot of development happening….in many respects a slowdown is the best time to think ahead and establish a framework for handling the growth-related issues that will inevitably return.”