On ENAR, or Statistical Meetings in General

Last year I accepted an invitation from Ben to go to ENAR 2013 -- my first ENAR. I used to go to JSM and useR!, and apparently I enjoy useR! most. The reason is not, or not only, because I'm more of a technical person. It is just hard to concentrate at large statistical conferences. I want to make a few suggestions from the perspective of a student, although it is unlikely that any future conference chairs will come here and listen to me:

1. Go green and get rid of printed programs. A program book is thick and clunky and nobody will take it with them when they leave. The hundreds of pages of paper will only end up in garbage. If you have to print them, print N/5 copies instead (N is the number of participants) and let the participants share with each other.
2. Improve the websites and add social network features. For example, we can "reserve" the talks which we are interested, so all participants immediately know which are the popular and highly expected talks, and organizers can schedule appropriate rooms. The discussion session by John Chambers, Duncan Temple Lang, Thomas Lumley and Michael Lawrence at the last JSM in San Diego was a failure in the sense that many people were standing outside of the room (presumably fans of John Chambers). By comparison, my session at ENAR was assigned to a room of (more than?) 400 seats but only 20 people showed up.
3. If we tell the organizers which sessions we plan to go, the program book can be a lot thinner! If there are changes in these sessions, only a small group of people need to be notified. If you notify everybody by inserting a few pieces of announcements, it is a waste of time of most people.
4. One thing I really wish to have for conferences is I want to know which people in my "circle" are also going there. It is hard to go through 1000 names of participants and spot some familiar names. I met a friend at ENAR who collaborated with me (translating an English R tutorial to Chinese) almost 10 years ago but we have never really met in person so we do not know each other. I did not know he was coming as well. I was just sitting on the sofa in a corner and he randomly saw my badge. We were so excited that we finally met in such an unexpected place.
5. If participants can make connections with each other beforehand, it is likely to save us money as well -- we can share the costs when we rent cars, take cabs, book hotels and so on.
6. So please do not charge us upon registration -- give us a deadline and charge us later. Perhaps I will change my mind later if I cannot find enough interesting people to meet, or the popular talks seem irrelevant to me.
7. I heard from Hadley that some IEEE conferences require the speakers to do a 30-second talk before the conferences, and I think that will be cool and useful for statistical conferences as well. Nowadays I still hear certain speakers read their slides word by word. Some speakers may be shy or are not confident in their oral English, but I do not think the language problem is a really big problem. My suggestion to these speakers is to spend more time preparing jokes instead of the slides: jokes make the audience concentrate and speakers relax. I have told a lot of stupid jokes that I regret afterwards, but I think the net effect is still positive.
8. If it is not possible to arrange 30-second talks, the conference website should allow speakers upload mini versions of their talks to attract more audience.
9. Some people go to conferences for both presentations and sightseeing. Personally I do not care about the latter at all, but unfortunately all big conferences take place in famous big cities. This ENAR was held in the largest Marriott in the world. Am I proud of that? No, not at all, because I had to live in a much cheaper hotel three miles away. One evening I tried to walk back and it took me one hour and twenty minutes. What is more, this place is not really walkable -- I had to walk on the grass on the roadside for half an hour because there was no pavement! I do not really mind walking (even for three miles), but it is not a happy memory walking on the grass. The Marriott was such a closed universe that it was hard to walk out, as Karl's picture shows below:

There's a world outside #ENAR2013 but barbed wire to prevent us from getting there. twitter.com/kwbroman/statu…

— Karl Broman (@kwbroman) March 12, 2013

By comparison, useR! conferences often take place in a university campus. Last year it was in Vanderbilt, and they provided dorms to students. I lived happily in the dorm, because all I wanted was a place to sleep (there was free wireless too); nothing luxury. Usually there