2020, #WeMissiPRES and the best conference I have never attended

Steph Taylor is based in Los Angeles, USA. 

I’ve worked in digital libraries and archives for a long time, and I’ve always wanted to attend the iPRES conference,  but I’ve never made it. Given my many failed attempts, I was not expecting 2020, the year of the apocalypse, to be any different. But these are strange times. I heard about an online event called #WeMissiPRES, hosted by DPC and I rushed to book a place. The event was not iPRES, and the organisers (friends of iPRES), explained up front that there would be no heavy papers. Instead, they were aiming for a fringe festival, coffee shop vibe for the event. This sounded perfect.! My 2020 self needed to connect and learn, but in a gentle way.

The event itself was excellent. In recent years, there has been a shift to put more professional content online within the digital preservation community and the event benefited from this move. And in the age of the pandemic, many of us are now video conferencing experts.  Organisers, speakers and delegates easily picked up the etiquette of online interactions and each session ran smoothly. There was also a social element, which was a lot of fun and helped to provide the networking element often missing with online events.

The biggest and most significant shift for me was not the technology or the well-organised programme, but the range of participants. Although I had missed out on iPRES, I’ve had a number of  jobs where I’ve been privileged enough to attend many conferences. These conferences billed themselves as international, but as #WeMissiPRES unfolded, I realised that I had never attended a truly international conference. Most of my conferences had been based in Europe. There would be a lot of European-based delegates, with a smattering of people from elsewhere. I’d only been able to attend one conference outside Europe and was one of only a handful of European-based people there, with most people being from the local region.  So here I was, in a time of restricted national and international travel, when many people around the world were barely leaving their own homes, participating in an actual global event.

As I listened to the speakers, asked questions and added greetings and comments to chat, I was thinking and getting very excited on a whole other level. I realised that in a time of many restrictions, some huge barriers to participation had vanished. I started with my own. If iPRES had happened in 2020, I would not have been able to attend. I have no big organisation to fund my conference attendance right now and for personal reasons I don’t want to do long distance travel.

People introduced themselves as they joined the chat, and their names and locations scrolled by. I wondered who else wouldn’t have been able to attend an in-person iPRES ? Who didn’t have funds for conference fees, and other expenses if the event wasn’t local to them? Who was managing physical and mental health issues that made travel and staying away from home for a length of time difficult? Who worked as part of a small team and couldn’t afford time away from their job outside of annual leave? Who had an employer who didn’t support  attending in-person events? Who was a parent, a carer, a person with other responsibilities who couldn’t easily negotiate days away from the rest of their life? And who was here now, learning and sharing and joining in, having a chance to have a seat at the table, because so many of those barriers were not there?

I was struck with the idea that we could build a new type of event,  where online elements are not ignored or are peripheral add-ons, but are at the very centre. As a conference organiser, imagine being able to pick from a truly international list of speakers. If those old, physical place barriers were removed,  there would be a much bigger pool of people able to show up and speak about their work. And imagine how many more delegates would be able to participate. The chats and networking and ideas and plans we would share! The leaps forward in our work we could make!

I realise that online events still exclude people. They rely on a good internet connection, technologies and devices that are still out of reach of many people. This is not a small problem. But I do think it’s a good place to start. I’d like to thank DPC and the Friends of iPRES group for the event, and I’d like to ask anyone who is involved in organising a conference or event into the future to take a moment to think differently and to reimagine  online participation as the main event. Our digital preservation community is already strong, and growing. Imagine if 2020 was the year we really began to open up and started to connect on a whole new level.