Just because the conference abstracts sound good, doesn't mean they're earth-shattering by any stretch of the imagination. 1 and 2 are done most frequently, and for very good reasons: one enforces quality, the other gives audience members both a choice and a chance to walk around between rooms on a regular basis.

Fortunately, I'm not actually involved in organizing a conference right now, just at one.

Most conferences I go to don't even provide abstracts of papers at the actual conference. Whether this is laziness or knowing how many people will change their papers, I don't know. This weekend's conference did provide the abstracts. While I never had time to read them, and chose my sessions based on titles, themes, and authors, I did talk to several people who recognized my talk subject from having read the abstract.

To make up a statistic, I would say that one out of every seven conference papers I've attended at history conference has changed scope, title, or even topic is some significant way since the abstract was submitted months earlier.

I've heard of small conferences where all papers are circulated in advance, or at least, at the conference. It would make papers easier to follow; on the other hand, so much of a paper is in the presentation, in the way the plot is structured, that I would think it would ruin most of the punchlines and plot twists along the way.

I like the sound of a conference organized that way. It makes much more sense than precirculating and then reading the entire paper out loud, which, apparently, was how the Popular Science conference last weekend was run. The attendee I talked to was very enthusiastic about this approach, but it seems somewhat redundant to me. Precirculating would allow for more in-depth and thus more satisfying feedback for a paper.

After the first day, I gave up on the plenary sessions of this conference. I would rather be wide awake for three sessions than half-asleep for four of them. Including the plenaries, but not including evening activities, the schedule ran from 8:30 am - 6 pm, too many hours in a day for me to be able to listen attentively.

I hope the time blocks weren't too large at least. Part of my problem with starting at 8:30 in the morning was that it was a two and a half hour session, a little too long and early all together.

What happens is that abstract proposals are called for well before the date of the actual conference (in some cases, over a year). As the paper may not be written at that stage, it does happen that a somewhat different paper (though on a similar theme) may be what actually gets given. (People have been known to submit proposals for papers which would not, in the event, fit a 20-minute panel session.)

Yes, we can change our papers right up to the end. We can even improvise them on the fly if we like. The downside is that you sound like you have the certainty of knowing there will be published proceedings. Any publication to come out of one of these conferences is an extra-treat, and might be years in the making. There's no certainty it'll ever happen, and in most cases, it doesn't.

I think that's the usual way to set up a good, medium-small conference and it's worked quite well for me as an attendee at the ones I've been to. As long as you don't cram too many sessions into one day, I think it's rather civilized.

I have heard a fair amount of dispute over the virtues of parallel sessions or no parallel sessions: is it better to "force" everyone to hear everything (after all, you can't necessarily tell from the title if a paper will be relevant to your work)? Or accidentally place the two papers that an attendee is attending for in direct conflict with each other?