Semi-related and somewhat off-topic, so forgive me for following that different track – but I recently thought about how one of the major benefits of EAGx Virtual for me was that it worked as a recommender system of sorts, in the form of “people reading my Grip profile (or public messages in Slack) and letting me know of other people and projects that I might be interested in”. A lot of “oh you’re interested in X? Have you heard of Y and Z?” which often enough led me to new interesting discoveries.
I’m curious if there may be a better approach to this, rather than “have a bunch of people get together and spontaneously connect each other with facts/ideas/people/projects based on mostly random interactions”. This current way seems to work quite well, but it is also pretty non-systematic, luck-based, and doesn’t scalethat well (it kind of does, but only in the “more people participate and invest time → more people benefit” kind of way).
(That all being said, conferences obviously have a lot of other benefits than this recommender system aspect; so I’m not really asking whether there are ways to improve conferences, but rather whether there are different/separate approaches to connecting people with the information most relevant to them)
Semi-related and somewhat off-topic, so forgive me for following that different track – but I recently thought about how one of the major benefits of EAGx Virtual for me was that it worked as a recommender system of sorts, in the form of “people reading my Grip profile (or public messages in Slack) and letting me know of other people and projects that I might be interested in”. A lot of “oh you’re interested in X? Have you heard of Y and Z?” which often enough led me to new interesting discoveries.
I’m curious if there may be a better approach to this, rather than “have a bunch of people get together and spontaneously connect each other with facts/ideas/people/projects based on mostly random interactions”. This current way seems to work quite well, but it is also pretty non-systematic, luck-based, and doesn’t scalethat well (it kind of does, but only in the “more people participate and invest time → more people benefit” kind of way).
(That all being said, conferences obviously have a lot of other benefits than this recommender system aspect; so I’m not really asking whether there are ways to improve conferences, but rather whether there are different/separate approaches to connecting people with the information most relevant to them)