We organized a series of sessions at the Congress on Youth and Winter Sports 2020 in Lausanne, tied to the Youth Olympic Games. Our sessions were entitled Events, Cities, and Urbanism and focused on the connections between mega-events and urban development from a variety of perspectives.

The papers were great, I thought. We had wonderful contributors and I was happy to sit on the sidelines this time as an organizer instead of presenting or, more typically for me, doing both at once. That said, and in keeping with what I usually do in this space after conferences, here are a few lessons I learned this time around.

First, organizing these sessions was much more convoluted than it could have or should have been. There is no one to blame for this. Rather, it turned out to be more of a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation, and it came about for good reasons.

There were four of us organizing, two senior scholars and two postdocs. All of us get along well, and each brought something unique to the group.

The biggest problem came about over time due to a lack of clarity about communication and division of responsibilities. See, each of the four of us contacted different people to invite them, based on personal connections. This sounds great in theory, but what we failed to do then was to unify communication with these contributors under one person! This led to a lot of confusion and duplicated conversations, for instance like this:

Session Organizer 1 invites Speaker 1

Session Organizer 2 contacts Conference Organizer 1 about some information.

Session Organizer 2 writes letter to all Speakers, regarding info.

Speaker 1 responds to Session Organizer 2 with question.

And there you have it. That seems simple enough, but what it means in practice is several dozen email threads that sometimes overlap. In the end, there was a notable lack of coherent communication that I, personally, found frustrating.

The takeaway lesson, I think, is to establish one person as the lightning rod for communications. That’s hard to do, of course, if someone else has done the initial contacting. But I think having that discipline earlier on would have paid off handsomely in the end. It’s really worthwhile to have a unified voice in communications, I think. Like a press secretary for the group.

The other big takeaway was related to the conference overall. I think we all were anticipating something a bit more theoretically informed, maybe more sociological, maybe more urban, maybe more critical. As it was, our sessions were pretty much the only opportunity to discuss mega-events as a phenomenon (much less with a critical edge), and so it felt rather lonesome at times. There’s nothing really to learn here, except I think to remember that sometimes the conference itself doesn’t necessarily cater to your interests. The hardest thing for me was making sure that the speakers we invited didn’t feel out of sorts, because I myself was quite surprised by this turn. It really was more of a “hooray for sports!” sort of event, rather than having much to do with questioning mega-events as a whole. Although maybe it was better that way, as we were sort of in unfamiliar territory and could – perhaps – speak directly to people who may not have questioned the knock-on effects of the events that they love.