On organizing a meeting

I'm organizing a small conference.  Sweet Jesus is it a lot of work.  And anxiety.

One of my first tasks when I started my postdoc was to organize this thing.  What an intimidating, enticing challenge.

In addition to managing all the logistical decisions (what space will we use? what is the budget? how much will the registration fee be? will we have a poster session? how will we solicit and review abstracts? how will we determine the invited:contributed speaker ratio? how long will the talks be? and on and on), I had to develop the themes for each session and the meeting overall, invite the invited speakers, solicit industry sponsors, and write proposals for funding.  It's weird and hard to assemble the right mix of speakers in a field that you have only just entered.  Oh, and trying to stick to my principles and make sure there is good representation by women when I don't know enough players in the field to suggest any.  Boo!

Of course I'm not doing this totally on my own. I've had lots of input from my colleagues, and critically, other people have laid the groundwork for invited speakers, or funding, or lent clout to my emails with their names in the cc line.  Still, on the whole, I've been the lead on this thing.  My influence has probably shifted the focus toward my old field a little bit, so I'm curious to see how that will play out in the quality and cohesion of the program.

In sum, I wish I hadn't had to spend so much of my precious postdoc time on a service task, but I'm glad to have tried something new and to gain so much visibility in this new field.