[Air-l] More thought on 'Virtual conference'

[Soraj Hongladarom]

Dear all,

I just would like to add my two cents on Prof. Wu's comments on 
virtual conferences. I used to attend several of them, but my 
experience is that I could not find enough time to read all the 
papers and to follow all the discussions sitting in my office. There 
are a lot of distractions -- students coming in demanding answers, 
committee meetings, phone calls, etc. These are the normal aspects of 
life in the office. But when I am away on a trip to a conference, I 
can leave all that away and focus on the papers being presented. And 
I come back feeling much freshened up. At first I thought I could 
focus more on the papers being presented online, but I just found 
myself downloading most of the papers for later reading, and the 
discussion aspect is limited to posting on email lists.

One way to solve the issue of international travelling, visas, etc. 
is to hold an AoIR conference closer to home. In my and Prof. Wu's 
case that would be in Asia. Trip to HK for me is not as daunting as 
one to the US. Perhaps someone might want to propose that there be 
'regional' conferences such that those in Asia could attend them.

Cheers,
Soraj

-- 
Soraj Hongladarom

Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts
Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok 10330, Thailand
Tel. +66(0)22 18 47 56; Fax +66(0)22 18 47 55

ASEAN-EU LEMLIFE Project: http://www.asean-eu-lemlife.org/
The 2nd Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Conference:
	http://www.stc.arts.chula.ac.th/CAP/AP-CAP.html
Personal: http://pioneer.chula.ac.th/~hsoraj/web/soraj.html