S1:E18 Eric Handler – Running a virtual conference

Tyler Jacobson 0:00

Welcome to LabChats, a podcast from the team at LabStats. I’m Tyler Jacobson, your host for today’s episode. Each week we’ll sit down with technology leaders in higher education to get the latest buzz and insights while we discuss current events, trends, problems and solutions. Now let’s get into it.

Joining us on LabChats today we have Eric Handler who works with the IT department at Macalester College. And Eric has been intimately involved in this year’s SIGUCCS Conference. And so that’s what we wanted to talk mainly about today. Eric, is there anything else about your background that you wanted to add in or anything that that you would like to share?

Eric Handler 0:43

I’ll just say, by day, I’m an academic technologist at McAllister and nights, weekends and wherever I can squeeze it in, I’m currently serving as the Vice Chair of the Executive Committee for SIGUCCS.

Tyler Jacobson 0:57

In case there’s anybody that’s unaware of SIGUCCS, give me a little bit of background on what SIGUCCS is, the mission statement and who’s involved.

Eric Handler 1:05

Sure. So SIGUCCS is the ACM special interest group for university and college computing services. So much like some of the big SIGs that are out there, we’ve got SIG Chai and SIG Graph, those are computer human interaction. And the GFX one, those make the big headlines with you know, the New York Times and The Verge, talking about all the cool technology research that’s happening. SIGUCCS is a little smaller than that. We typically have about 200 people attend our annual conference and anywhere from 8 to 20 attend our regularly scheduled webinar sessions during a non-pandemic here. And we are focused on those higher ed staff members and some faculty who support information technology in the classroom and around the classroom. Anything from email support to helping faculty with research, which is what I do in my day job, the one that pays the bills. SIGUCCS pays the emotional bills, I get to hang out with all my cool colleagues from around the country and the world. I think that’s one of the really nice things about sigfox as a community is that we have an international attendance, we’re not just a hyper-focused, US conference and group. We have two groups, we have our conference committees, and we have our Executive Committee, we do events outside of our conference every year. But that’s the one that’s the flashiest because we get to go to a city somewhere and see each other face to face.

Tyler Jacobson 2:38
And as far as we’re aware, this is one of the most long running academic community conferences in the world. When did you become involved in SIGUCCS? And how have you kind of moved up through the participation in that?

Eric Handler 2:52

Yeah, I don’t know if we’re truly the longest running. I do know that 2023 will mark—assuming we don’t have any cancellations for 2020—to our 50th conference. So yeah, we’ve been around for a little while. I got started with SIGUCCS in 2015. Shortly after I returned to higher education IT. I had done some undergraduate studies and worked as a student worker at a help desk during that time, got my computer science degree, went off into the world and said, “You know what, higher ed is a great place to work, I want to go back to it.” And then shortly after that attended my first SIGUCCS in St. Petersburg in 2015. Ask me about the Dali museum at some point here or on Twitter or wherever it makes sense. My involvement started because it’s a great community. I mentioned we get about 200 attendees. And I think that’s a great size for making connections. When you go to something like EDUCAUSE and there’s 10,000, 30,000, whatever the number is, people, it’s harder to get those connections and then keep them going from year to year. And so I was able to get connected with even the conference committee in the executive committee of the organization, starting from basically day one and my first SIGUCCS. And so I was able to get involved. And we have activities at our physical conference that promote that. We have a hospitality suite. So if you are maybe rundown after a day of sessions of learning important things that you’re going to take back to your institution, instead of having to go out into St. Petersburg or Denver or Seattle, all these places we’ve been in the last few years. You don’t have to find your own fun. We’ve sort of built this framework for that fun, and we’ve got board games and some years we have karaoke, which depending on your preference may or may not be fun, but a way to in space that’s created by the conference to build those bonds with your co-workers from around the world to then be ready to connect when you need help six months later. You’re like, “Hey, you remember that conversation we had over that game of Codenames about multi-factor authentication rollouts? Can you tell me a little bit more about how you did it? Or can you share your notes as you were exploring different companies to support that so that I can give my institution a heads up and a little bit of a boost in our start to that process?” And that’s really what made me want to get more involved. Probably, honestly, 65 to 75% board games, 25% the work, but it certainly was a nice draw for me to bring me into that workspace as well.

Tyler Jacobson 5:29

When was the last on site ‘meet in person’ conference? Was that in New Orleans?

Eric Handler 5:35

Yes, the last time we were able to gather the community together in person was in New Orleans in November of 2019.

Tyler Jacobson 5:41

And I had the privilege of attending that one. And you were mentioning the non work related activities, and…it was exceptionally well done. The after work activities were exceptionally well attended. So for instance, some of the out of the box things you would never think going to a higher education IT conference would end up with you standing in the locker room at Mercedes stadium and on the fields, looking at the Saints’ emblems. I mean, I thought that was incredible. [It] made my son horribly jealous, which was fantastic. And so I must applaud the fact that you guys put so much thought into the social element and things that are outside of just it, which all of that content was well done as well. One of the things you decided to be, or you were invited to be a co-chair this year. What does a co-chair do?

Eric Handler 6:43

So the program chair, so there’s, sometimes we have conference co-chairs, too. So I’m going to be specific about program co-chairs. Program co-chairs have two major responsibilities for the conference. The first is arranging our keynote speaker or speakers. Working out the contract details, all of those…fun, I’ll say fun. My sense of funds may be a little twisted after 2020 and most of 2021 so far. Those fun logistical details like travel and all that and arranging for who you want to speak. And that also gives you the first opportunity towards the second responsibility, which is managing the content of the event. And so our conference is part of the ACM umbrella organization. So many of our presentations require a written peer-reviewed paper. That’s a little different. If you do a panel or some other types of sessions, it may not require a paper. But that process of getting our authors to submit the initial abstract for their paper, review that, help them write the papers, go through the peer review, get them formatted and then published. All of our presenters become published authors as a result of presenting at SIGUCCS, which is a really great opportunity for some folks, it’s part of their process of keeping their tenure status, if they’re lucky enough to be a staff member who can earn tenure at their institution, things like that. But it’s also a great opportunity, because it means that the work you’ve done lives on past the conference. Many institutions pay to have access to the ACM Digital Library as part of their library organizations. And so I know that the work I’ve done and the work that my friends from SIGUCCS have done, if I know they gave a presentation in 20—hold on, I’m looking at my mug to see what year that presentation was—2017 about the different personalities of people who will need support. And they frame that in the context of the cats from ‘Cats’, that I can go read the paper associated with that if I need to refresh my memory on what it really means if you’re the support person, and you’ve got a Rum Tum Tugger coming into your support area.

Tyler Jacobson 8:55

When you are recruiting for people that do these presentations, is it a mix of people that you reach out to in order to request that they do a presentation or them proactively reaching out to you requesting to participate?

Eric Handler 9:11

In a regular year it’s mostly the author’s coming to us. I think we’re probably going to see some changes as a result of the pandemic that are going to lead us towards doing a little bit more active recruiting. I think that may mean that we are doing things like soliciting feedback where we know…because we’re in the community, we know that so and so did some great work on—I’m going to stick with two-factor authentication because it’s on my brain today apparently—doing a rollout of two-factor authentication. And we want to hear how that went and what the pros and cons were. Or thinking about who I’m talking to if somebody did great work with the LabStats tools during the pandemic to help facilitate virtual labs, having them come in hopefully with you as a co-presenter to talk to the community about how that went and why It worked. And maybe sometimes you learn something that didn’t quite work and how you fix that. That’s the important part about the partnerships, especially with our exhibitors.

Tyler Jacobson 10:11

And you bring up the exhibitors. And one of the things that again, we need to give a compliment to you is of all the conferences that we’ve attended, whether it’s on site or virtual, you’re one of the only that has reached out to the vendors themselves for feedback. So what was the feedback that you received from vendors as well as from the participants for your virtual event this year?

Eric Handler 10:37

I got to lead with the bad news. It turns out, everybody likes getting together in person. And so we got a lot of feedback, we missed the in person event. And I think everybody probably knew that. So I’ll just get that out of the way. The other feedback we got is that the way we chose to change our presentations was actually really something that people enjoyed. What we ended up doing for almost all of our sessions was having our authors pre record their content. And we had at least one reason to do that that comes to mind, which was we wanted to make sure that we didn’t have to reschedule things. If someone’s internet connection was bad. I’m sure there are other reasons, but they’re escaping me at the moment. But what that meant is it changed our model in terms of presentation because if our authors didn’t have internet connectivity problems, they were there in the chat while the video of them presenting was being shared. And so they were able to answer questions live, we got a lot of good feedback that said that that live interaction where you didn’t have to hold on to your question for 25 or 30 minut