Generating Stakeholder Value Through Increasingly Hybridized Conferences: Insights from 30 Years of ACIS Conferences

Abstract

In the last few years, changes to the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) have accelerated in response to COVID-19, as well as climate change, technological advances, and trends in the tertiary sector. These underlying conditions have generated much discussion within annual conference committees and their partners. These discussions were ongoing before the pandemic but have increased in importance as a result of the pandemic and a trend towards hybridization and virtualization of some or all conference events. In this paper, we distill these ongoing discussions and apply them specifically to the issues identified in a recent AIS task force report on conference virtualization. We identify the stakeholders in the conference ecosystem and the risks they would incur from poor quality conference experiences. Through this analysis we provide 57 recommendations to mitigate the risks of a poor conference experience and to improve value-creation opportunities. We hope our recommendations and reflections can advance the debate and help conferences continuously adapt to their changing environment to realize their potential to generate value for their IS communities.