Do you attribute the main information exchange to have happened in formal discussion (things on the agenda) or to chatting more informally?
Both were important. Formal discussions and things on the agenda were great for seeing the general state of the art and how people were doing things and how our lab could improve, as well as going through the list of sessions and saying 'oh wow that looks fascinating' and getting exposed to new ideas. But my own research got the most direct benefit from unstructured talking with other researchers and people seeing my name and research on the list of posters and coming by to talk, and vice versa.
I'm asking this as a follow-up to http://lesswrong.com/lw/d5y/why_academic_papers_are_a_terrible_discussion/, which was written a few years ago, and which I find very interesting.
Many of the arguments advanced in http://lesswrong.com/lw/d5y/why_academic_papers_are_a_terrible_discussion/ (especially inaccessibility) could just as well apply to conferences, too.
I'd also wonder - would you consider conferences to also be a terrible discussion forum? What do you think would be some good alternatives?
The audience for conferences is limited, and people seem to remember only a tiny tiny fraction of everything they've encountered in a conference. The ideas in conferences don't seem to do much for building up platforms of public discussions around the new subjects that are often announced in conferences (rather than, say, on online platforms).
I suppose one could advance the argument that ideas often get brought up/discussed at conferences that wouldn't be conveniently discussed in any other medium (for now..). But is this mostly because people are too comfortable with what they're been brought up with?