A BlueBox Events blue paper by Nicole Fontein, December 2025. Bilingual, Dutch and English.
Large international conferences remain one of the most powerful instruments in science. They bring people, ideas and data together at a scale that is hard to match online. But knowledge is always available online now, collaboration is hybrid, and early-career researchers think carefully about what they travel for.
Imagine Anna, at her first large conference. She picks parallel sessions at random, gets lost in a hall of hundreds of posters, and goes home having heard a lot but connected little. The content was strong; the experience was diffuse. How do we design conferences so that Anna will say: this was worth the trip?
This blue paper sets out a design approach built on three pillars:
- Clarity: fewer parallel sessions, daily anchor sessions and visible priorities.
- Connection: pathways with hosts, Meet Your 5 on Day 0, hosted lunches and pathway hubs.
- Impact: Preference Pulse panels, problem sprints, ePosters that go live weeks early, and spark sessions for early-career researchers.
We don’t change what we accept. We change how it is experienced.
The paper ends with a light pilot you can run at your next conference, and a glossary of the formats.
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