Conferencing During Hard Times: A Hope, Skip, and A Jump (table D)

A unique international negotiation conference was offered to the negotiation and conflict management community in 2021. Organized by a group of seven colleagues, this conference was conducted without a sponsoring organization, and without a budget, while the conference aim was to inspire ideas (the first step of research) rather than the reporting of research results. The conference format was carefully designed to be user-friendly for all participants – just a hop, skip, and a jump to attend and contribute.

Led by volunteers that evolved into the Conference Steering Committee, this conference included six panel facilitators and over 25 speakers from diverse disciplines and countries with a broad range of scholarly and practical experience. The conference was offered without a registration fee – thus, freely available to any student, researcher, or scholar willing to log-on to the Biennale Roundtables on Negotiation: Theory, Research and Practice on 19 Nov 2021.

COVID-inspired, this conference sought to follow in the footsteps of the Paris-based International Biennale on Negotiation (commencing in 2003 with the sixth and most recent conference convened in 2016).

The goal of our IACM roundtable is to share what we learned by organizing and delivering an international internet conference without sponsorship and budget. We will also identify some of the learning gained by those in attendance and outline what panel members gained by participating in our Conference. In so doing, this IACM roundtable might inspire others to undertake the steps required to build an international internet conference relevant to their specific interest.