There’s now a group of people taking a look at whether and how to set up some sort of ongoing fiscal entity for the annual Code4Lib conference. Of course, one question that comes to mind is why go to the effort? What makes the annual Code4Lib conference so special?
There are lot of narratives out there about how the Code4Lib conference and the general Code4Lib community has helped people, but for this post I want to focus on the conference itself. What does the conference do that is unique or uncommon? Is there anything that it does that would be hard to replicate under another banner? Or to put it another way, what makes Code4Lib a good bet for a potential fiscal host — or something worth going to the effort of forming a new non-profit organization?
A few things that stand out to me as distinctive practices:
- The majority of presentations are directly voted upon by the people who plan to attend (or who are at least invested enough in Code4Lib as a concept to go to the trouble of voting).
- Similarly, keynote speakers are nominated and voted upon by the potential attendees.
- Each year potential attendees vote on bids by one or more local groups for the privilege of hosting the conference.
- In principle, most any aspect of the structure of the conference is open to discussion by the broader Code4Lib community — at any time.
- Historically, any surplus from a conference has been given to the following year’s host.
- Any group of people wanting to go to the effort can convene a local or regional Code4Lib meetup — and need not ask permission of anybody to do so.
Some practices are not unique to Code4Lib, but are highly valued:
- The process for proposing a presentation or a preconference is intentionally light-weight.
- The conference is single-track; for the most part, participants are expected to spend most of each day in the same room.
- Preconferences are inexpensive.
Of course, some aspects of Code4Lib aren’t unique. The topic area certainly isn’t; library technology is not suffering any particular lack of conferences. While I believe that Code4Lib was one of the first libtech conferences to carve out time for lightning talks, many conferences do that nowadays. Code4Lib’s dependence on volunteer labor certainly isn’t unique, although putting aside keynote speakers) Code4Lib may be unique in having zero paid staff.
Code4Lib’s practice of requiring local hosts to bootstrap their fiscal operations from ground zero might be unique, as is the fact that its planning window does not extend much past 18 months. Of course, those are both arguably misfeatures that having fiscal continuity could alleviate.
Overall, the result has been a success by many measures. Code4Lib can reliably attract at least 400 or 500 attendees. Given the notorious registration rush each fall, it could very likely be larger. With its growth, however, come substantially higher expectations placed on the local hosts, and rather larger budgets — which circles us right back to the question of fiscal continuity.
I’ll close with a question: what have I missed? What makes Code4Lib qua annual conference special?
Update 2016-06-29: While at ALA Annual, I spoke with someone who mentioned another distinctive aspect of the conference: the local host is afforded broad latitude to run things as they see fit; while there is a set of lore about running the event and several people who have been involved in multiple conferences, there is no central group that dictates arrangements. For example, while a couple recent conferences have employed a professional conference organizer, there’s nothing stopping a motivated group from doing all of the work on their own.
What makes the annual Code4Lib conference special? by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.