KITP

The script for scientific conferences (a widespread activity in the academic world) is a series of talks illustrated via presentation software.  The talks are generally “set” pieces, given, perhaps, with incremental modifications again and again from conference to conference or from one guest seminar appearance to the next.  These set pieces are designed to take up 55 minutes of the hour customary allotted to speakers with five minutes at the end reserved for audience participation in the form of questions or comments that can only invoke short responses.

So the traditional conference-talk functions more as an advertisement for the speaker’s research, than as a collaborative exploration of ideas.  That is not to say that traditional academic conferences are not productive, just that the give-and-take conversations about ideas happen not so much in the lecture hall, but outside in the hallways.

That is the mold the KITP model is designed to break by inducing speakers and audience members to interact more and more authentically.   The idea is to adapt the dynamic hallway-mode (typically involving two or three conversers) to the otherwise static lecture hall format.  It takes, of course, much more time to work together to explore ideas than to give or listen to traditional conference talks, and KITP programs are measured in weeks and months, instead of days.

Conferences with their fixed lecture format used to serve as the mode for the pre-publication dissemination of ideas and results.  Now, scientists post their papers on the Internet.

It also used to be (and still is, in many cases) that scientists would go to a conference, give talks, write up the presentations, and submit them to organizers responsible for producing a volume of conference proceedings appearing a year later when interest in the contents had likely declined.

The KITP does hold weeklong conferences in conjunction with most programs.  But instead of appearing a year later in print, proceedings are immediately available on-line via the KITP Talk Archive.  That archive consists of more than 10 years of some 10,000 talks.  The effort began with recording and posting KITP conference proceedings and later expanded to include talks in the programs.