The question at hand
Your professional association just announced it's moving from local in-person events to a global online conference series with three regional sessions per event. You're looking at a calendar invite for a session scheduled at 2 a.m. your time, with two other sessions you can't attend because they conflict with your workday.
This is the new reality for digital preservation practitioners. As organizations like the Digital Preservation Coalition shift to worldwide online formats, they're wrestling with a fundamental question: Do we optimize for global reach or local convenience? The answer isn't obvious, and it carries real implications for how knowledge moves through our field.
The case for global formats
Global conference formats solve a problem that's plagued digital preservation for years: geographic inequality. When your flagship events happen in London or Washington, you've effectively locked out practitioners in Jakarta, São Paulo, and Cape Town. Not because they lack expertise, but because they lack travel budgets.
The Digital Preservation Coalition's new "Around The World" events illustrate one approach: four annual mini-conferences, each with three half-day sessions tailored to Americas, Australasia/Asia Pacific, and European/African/West Asian time zones. Each region gets its own program and, where possible, a regional co-chair. The themes (Risk Management, Preserving Complex Objects, AI for Digital Preservation, and Preservation at Scale) come from member surveys, not headquarters assumptions.
This structure acknowledges what regional events never could: digital preservation challenges don't respect borders. When you're implementing ISO 14721 (the OAIS reference model), you need to hear how teams in Singapore handle Submission Information Package validation differently than teams in Stockholm. When you're designing fixity checks for Archival Information Packages, the Australian perspective on long-term bit preservation in unstable power grids matters as much as the Swiss approach.
Global formats also create asynchronous learning opportunities. Record the Americas session, and European attendees can watch it during their morning coffee. This turns time zones from a barrier into an advantage: you get three different takes on the same theme, not one perspective repeated three times.
The case for regional focus
But here's what global formats sacrifice: the coherence of shared experience.
When everyone attends the same session at the same time, you build a common vocabulary. You reference the same case studies in hallway conversations. You can assume your colleague saw the same presentation on preservation metadata standards that you did. Global formats fragment this. Your Americas colleague attended a session on risk assessment frameworks you never saw. Your Asia-Pacific counterpart heard a speaker discuss regulatory compliance approaches that didn't come up in your European session.
Regional events also understand local context in ways global formats struggle to replicate. Preservation Description Information requirements under ISO 30300 look different when you're managing records subject to GDPR versus records governed by Australian privacy law. A session designed for a European audience can dig into these specifics. A global session has to stay generic enough to apply everywhere, which often means it applies precisely nowhere.
There's also the practical reality of attention. A half-day session at 10 a.m. your time gets your full focus. A recording you watch later while answering emails gets whatever's left after you've triaged your inbox. The DPC's earlier experiments with "Watch Party" events (replaying recordings with a local speaker added) tried to split this difference, but recorded content never quite matches live engagement.
And let's be honest about the networking loss. Regional in-person events let you grab coffee with the person who just presented on controlled vocabulary design for business classification schemes. You can't do that with a speaker in a different hemisphere, even if their session was brilliant.
Where practitioners actually land
Most organizations running global programs end up with hybrid approaches. They'll host one truly global session (usually a keynote or panel) where everyone accepts that someone will be attending at an inconvenient hour. Then they break into regional tracks for the detailed technical content.
The key is making the regional sessions feel connected without forcing them to be identical. When the Digital Preservation Coalition mentions using regional co-chairs to build programs, they're acknowledging this: each region needs its own voice, but all three sessions should still feel like they're part of the same event.
Smart organizers also build in "connection points" between regions. Maybe each regional session includes a five-minute recap of highlights from the previous session. Or they create a shared discussion forum where attendees from all three regions can continue conversations asynchronously. The goal isn't to make everyone attend everything; it's to make the boundaries between regions permeable.
Our take
Global formats are the right direction for digital preservation, but only if you're willing to do the hard work of making them genuinely global rather than just "recorded and replayed."
That means accepting that each region will have different programs, not identical content in different time zones. It means investing in regional co-chairs who understand local preservation challenges and can recruit speakers who address them. It means building asynchronous discussion spaces that work across time zones, not just hoping people will watch recordings.
The Digital Preservation Coalition's experiment is worth watching because it's attempting this harder path. Four themes per year, each explored three different ways, acknowledges that there's no single "correct" approach to risk management in digital preservation or AI-assisted archival processing.
For your own organization, the question isn't whether to go global. If your membership or customer base spans continents, you've already gone global whether your event format admits it or not. The question is whether you're willing to let go of the illusion that one event can serve everyone equally, and instead build something that serves everyone differently but equitably.
That's harder to organize, harder to budget, and harder to measure success for. But it's also the only format that treats digital preservation as what it actually is: a global challenge that demands global collaboration, not just global attendance.
