Back in 2017, I noticed something that should have struck me as a little odd. My sub-field has a big yearly conference, called Amplitudes, that brings in everyone who works on our kind of research. Amplitudes 2017 was fun, but not “fresh”: most people talked about work they had already published. A smaller conference I went to that year, called QCD Meets Gravity, was much “fresher”: a lot of discussion of work in progress and work “hot off the presses”.

At the time, I chalked the difference up to timing: it was a few months later, and people happened to have projects that matured around then. But I realized recently there’s another reason, one why you would expect bigger conferences to have less fresh content.

See, I’ve recently been on the other “side of the curtain”: I was an organizer for Amplitudes last year. And I noticed one big obstacle to having fresh content: the timeframe.

The bigger a conference is, the longer in advance you need to invite speakers. It’s a bigger task to organize everyone, to make sure travel and hotels and raw availability works, that everyone has time to prepare their talks and you have a nice full (but not too full) schedule. So when we started asking people, we didn’t know what the “freshest” work was going to be. We had recommendations from our scientific committee (a group of experts in the subfield whose job is to suggest speakers), but in practice the goal is more one of breadth than freshness: we needed to make sure that everybody in our community was represented.

A smaller conference can get around this. It can be organized a bit later, so the organizers have more information about new developments. It covers a smaller area, so the organizers have more information about new hot topics and unpublished results. And it typically invites most of the sub-community anyway, so you’re guaranteed to cover the hot new stuff just by raw completeness.

This doesn’t mean small conferences are “just better” or anything like that. Breadth is genuinely useful: a big conference covering a whole subfield is great for bringing a community together, getting everyone on a shared page and expanding their horizons. There’s a real tradeoff between those goals and getting a conference with the latest progress. It’s not a fixed tradeoff, we can improve both goals at once (I think at Amplitudes we as organizers could have been better at highlighting unpublished work), but we still have to make choices of what to emphasize.