Microconferences

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000

One of the consequences of LLM proliferation is that significantly more academic papers are uploaded to arXiv and submitted to conferences. As the quality of papers drops and their number increases it becomes harder to find good ideas and problems among the noise.

Ben Recht has been critizing this for a while and suggests that the academic community should find other ways to evaluate, discuss and generate knowledge. He promotes microconferences as a solution:

While academia has exploded in size in the post-war period, the ideal size of a conference has remained constant. Small workshops with one or two dozen participants have consistently launched big ideas, forged multidisciplinary connections, and set new standards across fields. […] These workshops each had 10 to 30 people, were cross-disciplinary, aimed at bridging disciplinary boundaries, and focused on brewing creative, new ideas.

His guidelines for an effective conference are: small group of participants, bringing together people that didn’t know each other before, no organizing body to avoid bureaucracy, rotating leadership, talks/discussions/papers should be archived on a conference website.

Academia on staticnotes.org

Microconferences