A small workshop-format event in Manchester last weekend. About 25 attendees, no traditional talks, the whole day structured around small-group discussions of specific operational problems.
The format was new to me; the experience is worth a short note.
How the workshop format differs from talks
A talk has one speaker, one perspective, and most of the audience in passive-listening mode. A workshop has multiple discussions running in parallel, with attendees actively contributing to whichever they join. The information density is different — a talk is wide and shallow; a workshop is narrow and deep.
For specific operational problems — "how do we handle credential rotation in a large estate?", "what does a good incident-response playbook look like?" — the workshop format produces better answers. For general education or for novel research, the talk format is better.
What I learned
Three things.
My own answers are not as well-formed as I had thought. Several of the discussions revealed gaps in how I think about specific topics. "How would you handle X?" turned out to have answers I had not properly worked out.
Other practitioners' answers are sometimes very different from mine. The diversity of approaches to the same operational problem is wider than I had appreciated. Some of the alternative approaches are clearly better than mine; some clearly worse; many are sideways — different but not better or worse.
Workshops are tiring in a way talks are not. Active participation for a full day is more exhausting than passive listening. The recovery time is real.
What I am taking from this
For my own conference attendance: a mix of formats is more useful than just talks. I will look out for workshop-format events.
For my own writing: more posts about specific operational problems where I work through the answer in writing. The discipline of writing through the answer is similar to the discipline of discussing it in a workshop.
More as the year develops.