Concept for a "conference evaluation community"

Building a community around the purpose of designing a fair and useful system for conference evaluations

Assessing academic events like conferences in terms of quality, their scientific output, sustainability, diversity, openness and other dimensions increasingly becomes an area of interest for researchers, conference organizers, funders and other players in Science. Reasons for wanting to evaluate a conference can be as manifold as there are different aspects of a conference to evaluate. Oftentimes academic habitus and culture influence people’s evaluations which increase the complexity of this issue even further. Instead of trying to come up with a system for evaluating conferences in a top down fashion, without considering the opinions of those who are most affected by these kind of evaluations, a community driven approach is suggested which is expected to be better able to account for the complexity of the issue at hand. The talk will also focus on the plan how to build such a community with the purpose of designing a fair and useful system for conference evaluations.