That’s the question Cameron Buckner, Nick Byrd, and I raise in a guest post written for Daily Nous.
We hope you will read our post and join the discussion, especially of the following questions — you can answer them in the comments here or there, or privately via e-mail:
- In Minds Online, we closed comments on each session after a week, when the new session began. In several cases, we received excellent comments after the period had closed that we would have liked to have posted, but did not want to get in the practice of making special exceptions. Our reasoning for closing comments after a period of time was so that previous sessions did not detract attention from the next one. Was this worry well-founded? Should we have left comments open for a longer time?
- An innovation of our conference was the decision to space out sessions over four weeks, with one session per week (rather than posting all the papers and commentary simultaneously). Was this a good decision? Was the pacing and number of sessions about right?
- Is there more we could have done to bring in philosophers from other areas of the world?
- Is there more we could have done to be more equitable?
- We chose to have short introductory videos for each paper; the idea was that they were to provide a brief introduction that could help participants decide if they wanted to attend to that session. Were the videos helpful? Could they have been done better?
It goes without saying that we are very grateful to everyone who participated in the first Minds Online conference, and made it such a success!