The key is meeting people who are interested in similar things, or working on similar problems.
That's it - that's the entirety of it.
The dirty secret is conferences would be much better if they simply had no sessions scheduled at all, and locked everyone in the ballroom for the entire day.
I've run a very small (~20) conference over the last 15 yrs and this is basically the plan. We even had it on a cruise ship one year. The friendships, and collaborations that have ensued are a testament to its effectiveness.
(To be honest we do have a few short talks and an agenda to guide the discussions, but these are mostly requirements of the funding that we've found)
> The dirty secret is conferences would be much better if they simply had no sessions scheduled at all, and locked everyone in the ballroom for the entire day.
I've been to conferences where I simply forgot to attend any talks at all, simply because I was too busy/having fun chatting to people.
A lot of the more "professional" conferences have stands just for paying sponsors though, and usually not a lot of them. They tend to be a lot less lively than open source conferences and the like which allow any ol' open source project to set up a stand. I like stands because they're a good conversation starter, and in many ways also like a presentation yet a lot more informal.
Unfortunately all of that died with COVID in my area, and hasn't really started back up since :-(
Corollary to this is that Conferences are judged not by their overt content, but by their curation of the un-conferences / birds-of-a-feather meetings that they facilitate.
That's it - that's the entirety of it.
The dirty secret is conferences would be much better if they simply had no sessions scheduled at all, and locked everyone in the ballroom for the entire day.