After a professional conference, I often end up with a goodie bag full of CDs, DVDs, business cards, and marketing decks of cards. For weeks after, I run across the candies I've squirreled away in my backpack from the varous displays. My email box captures the occasional follow-up emails, and I am popular for a period with sales reps who call, full of cheer and hope. The presenters have had their bit of glory after slogging through the day-to-day development work the rest of the year / half year or quarter. Sometimes, the mail brings some more goodies - more of the goodie-bag variety.

By the time I've made it through the airport lounges, airplane rides, shuttle services, and long drives home, I've already read through most of the handouts and materials from the conferences. I have ideas of what I may want to follow up on in terms of research. I have the people I want to contact. And I have the additional work that I need to do for responses to queries. There are the usual ideas for shared projects, research ideas and grant pursuits.

There are the invitations to join various professional social networks, which I invariably decline. It seems to me that if there are professional alliances, those will become clear in actual work...and claimed alliances can be misleading and a waste of time...because so often, good ideas are not followed through in the real. Three are ways to create professional connections that may spark powerfully, but the underlying synergies have to work. Loose digital ties don't cut it. For all the "Let's do something together" or "I'd like to learn more about your projects," the afterglow of a professional conference often is done in front of a computer monitor.

Divvying up the Loot in the Office

I spend a morning sorting through the various goodies and resources among those in the office who have a "need to know" or even a curiosity. It seems less wasteful to give the contents a kind of second life.

Following Up with Loose Ends

Then, months after a conference, I'll sometimes think about whether the conference has finally published the papers or digital presentations. Those are still holding on to work, unpublished and unused, will get queries about whether I can publish that elsewhere, and then it's off to the other work, the real stuff that only gets alluded to during the conferences.