It was way back in May of 2008 that I finally decided to try to organize an online consciousness conference. Ten years later and the conference material from the resulting five online conferences is for the most part still there. There is the inevitable link rot that creeps in and I try to keep up with it but in some cases it is unavoidable. The first conference was hit the hardest because back then I used google video which went under (and somehow I lost all of the videos I had there) and hosted papers and related material on a server I can’t access anymore (I also let the custom url lapse a while back and it is now the original http://consciousnessonline.wordpress.com). A lot survives, though, and I have been glad to see people linking to it in their courses and some of the discussion (all of which is still there) has been cited in scholarly papers!

I actually had the idea for a consciousness-specific online conference in the summer of 2007, and bothered a few people about trying to get something like this going over the next year or so (I vaguely remember pitching the idea of a Kripke & Consciousness online conference to the early Kripke Center in 2007).  My experience at the Tucson consciousness conference in April of 2008 finally goaded me to act. I had just recently started blogging (happy 11th birthday to this blog by the way!) and seen the Online Philosophy Conference so I thought that was an ideal format (but with more video). People warned me that it was too much work and that the previous online philosophy conferences had not really succeeded. I thought if it was kept small it could be done, and since I was tired of waiting for someone else to do it, I set out to do it myself. I spent the summer getting ready,  announced the conference in August of 2008 and held the conference in February of 2009 (papers published in April of 2010)…a lot of work but also a lot of fun!

I organized the last one in 2013 and the final special issue I edited as a result of that came out in 2015. All in all that is seven years I invested into that project! It was a shame that I had to stop because I really enjoyed working on it and was trying to grow it into something but as I was coming up for tenure it was communicated to me that my scholarly work was excellent and that I needed to focus on contributing something to the college. In other words, another conference, and another publication was not going to help me get tenure (this is how I interpreted it anyway). So I turned my focus to organizing things at LaGuardia and I just could not do both with my teaching load (5/4 plus extra classes). I was awarded tenure in the fall of 2015 and I briefly thought about trying to revive it but by then I had kids! Plus, I have been happy to see the Brains Blog, and their Minds Online Conference (and now Neural Mechanisms Online) spring up to fill the void (by the way, here is the excellent special session for CO5 organized by John Schwenkler).

One thing I have learned is that it is possible for one person/a small group of people to make an impact but what we really need is to ‘institutionalize’ online conferences, by which I mean have them sponsored by professional organizations like the APA or the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness  (or the Tucson Center for Consciousness Studies, etc) but it is not clear how to do that without money entering the picture (I footed the small bill for any costs related to running Consciousness Online and everyone else worked for free!).

The thing I am most proud of is that the conferences all resulted in publications (4 journal issues and one book). My basic idea was to have the conference itself count as part of the review process. The papers were usually rewritten after discussion and then sent out for a more traditional review before finally being published (and so the result was not just a conference proceedings but a new paper sharpened by the conference (remember I was still an idealistic graduate student at the time!)). I was very lucky to have the general editor from the Journal of Consciousness Studies initially approach me about editing a special issue and I ran with it from there. A quick check of Google Scholar shows that the six resulting papers from the first conference have (mostly) done pretty well since being published in 2010.