Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead Books, 2018) and founder of Thrive Labs, “helps activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators, and philanthropists create transformative gatherings.” I’ve been making my way through her book for several months now, egged on by the notion of a “transformative gathering”—especially for a conference whose theme is “Transformative!”—and heartened that so much of what we’ve discussed and implemented aligns with her wisdom.
But she has also expanded my way of thinking about SAA conferences with her concept of generous authority: “A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confident hand, but it is run selflessly, for the sake of others…. When I tell you to host with generous authority, I’m not telling you to domineer. I’m saying to find the courage to be authoritative in the service of three goals”—protect your guests, equalize your guests, and connect your guests.
See my column in the March/April issue of Archival Outlook (page 24) for many of the steps we’re taking to ensure that those goals are met at ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2019 in Austin.
In addition, we’re plunging into live streaming in an attempt to connect with those who aren’t able to attend the Austin meeting, whether due to travel bans (as for California state employees) or other constraints (usually financial) that affect folks around the country. Our grand experiment this year is to live stream 18 education sessions and the two plenaries so that non-attendees may participate in real time with the conference. Why 18 sessions? Because live streaming is (still) really expensive (at $5,500 per room per day), and we decided to capture the two sessions across nine time slots that the Program Committee thinks will attract the most attendees. The sessions will not be interactive virtually; we encourage you to use Twitter to share thoughts and ask questions. (Use #SAA19 plus the session number, such as #101. We’ve asked the session chairs to designate someone in the live-streamed sessions who will follow Twitter and pose questions to the speakers.)
We’ll be packaging the live-stream option with on-demand (after-the-fact) access to the live-streamed videos plus audio recordings and dynamic screen (slide) capture of all education sessions and (for the first time) SAA section meetings. There are many technical details to be worked out, but watch the SAA and conference websites for announcements about the package. It will be available to non-attendee members for around $99—and to all conference registrants as part of their registration fee.
Never ones to let grass grow under our feet, watch the SAA website for the Call for Proposals for “Creating Our Future”—the next big gathering of CoSA and SAA at our 2020 Joint Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Off the Record 
Thank you so much for this blog post, and your time and energy to make it happen! Now a days one of the major leaps is that we have now moved from using a remote control to smart phones. But its very difficult to find the genuine website or apps for a live streaming of sports and entertainment channels. So the steps explained by you are really very helpful. Thanks for sharing this beautiful information!