Advances in Conference Usability
A little bird reports that at the Usable Security Conference they handed out conference proceedings in PDF form on a flash drive. I’m told that the flash drive was cheaper than printing on paper. I hope this trend spreads, as I’m always lugging back paper from conferences along with the inevitable bag or t-shirt. Flash drives are easier to carry, and if I get too many of them, I can always put them together into a RAID drive.
Those clever usability experts. What will they think of next?
Photo “Gersterbrot” courtesy of hannesstruss
I kind of like having the paper proceedings at the conference, since it makes it easier to follow along during presentations or scan through the day before. And I know I’m not alone in this: I’ve seen several polls in conferences and workshops asking whether people prefer to get a printed version of the proceedings, and a majority usually say yes.
The usefulness of the proceedings after the conference for me is usually much lower, so I wouldn’t mind if they were printed on cheaper paper/without the fancy binding.
Were they searchable?