Recent quotes:

From Laura Baldwin - O’Reilly Media

Today, we’re sharing the news that we’ve made the very difficult decision to cancel all future O’Reilly in-person conferences and close down this portion of our business. Without understanding when this global health emergency may come to an end, we can’t plan for or execute on a business that will be forever changed as a result of this crisis. With large technology vendors moving their events completely on-line, we believe the stage is set for a new normal moving forward when it comes to in-person events.

Men ask most of the questions at scientific conferences; we can choose to change that -- ScienceDaily

"When women are 70% of a room, they still asked only about 40% of the questions," says Natalie Telis, then a graduate student at Stanford University. "At that rate an audience would need to be 80% or 90% women before question asking would be split evenly between men and women." Telis was inspired to study Q&A participation after a conference she attended as an undergraduate. She asked one question, but every other question she heard that day was asked by a man. To determine whether the ratio of questions asked was representative of the gender makeup of the audience, Telis and co-author Emily Glassberg recorded data about who asked questions after presentations they attended at seven conferences.

When networking works

Sleep from 4-8PM every day. “I nap every day in Davos sometime between the hours of 4-8pm. It’s the most efficient time to catch up on sleep so I can be fresh when the time is opportune. The opportune moments happen while dancing at one of the nightcaps or at a chateau where only a select group of people is invited. The conversations there can go on until the early morning hours.”
We want XOXO to represent the broad spectrum of amazing and interesting people across art and tech, but we haven’t done enough to let everyone who cares about these ideas feel welcome. More than 80% of the people who’ve wanted to attend XOXO in the past are white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied dudes, and we want everyone who’s not in that category to know XOXO is for you too.
Inside the cabinets above his desk, he has stored what may be his most valuable assets: stacks of the three-subject notebooks he uses while reporting. “Mead notebooks,” he says, “the best notebook in the world. David Remnick and I talk about how you can’t get anything to replace the Mead notebook, which is unavailable now. They take ink perfectly. There is a great flow. All the other notebooks are coated with something so your pen slides along.” In recent years, when he goes on reporting trips, he has resorted to making use of old Mead notebooks that still have blank pages.
Yahoo pulled the plug on Upcoming, the app I had used for years to track conferences and to socialize with contacts I met at conferences, at least in a minimal way. After Andy Baio and other founders left in the late ’00s it became an unloved orphan. But I like what it did, and I always expected that they, or someone else, would crack the code on how to make events more social. I signed up to try the new version of Conferize, and it falls short of my aspirations, but I like what they have done. It retains a strong social feel compared to others, like Lanyard (which seems to be shouting, for some reason).