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The purpose of this paper is to share a personal perspective on the 2012 Academy of Human Resource Development (AHRD) International Research Conference in the Americas held in Denver, Colorado. It explores the author's reflection on her experiences attending AHRD conference sessions related to companies based in India.

The author's reflection was based on participant observations from a constructionist perspective.

This paper argued that attending AHRD conference sessions related to South Asia enhanced the author's worldview.

This paper offers the personal perspective of an American doctoral student based on her observations as an attendee of AHRD conference sessions focused on business issues in South Asia.

In March, Pavilion and the University of Luton organised a conference ‐ Community Safety Five Years On. This article reviews the contributions of the speakers. It argues for the need to embrace the wider social exclusion agenda and unless community safety becomes a working habit, it risks returning to the limited status of ‘crime prevention’.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the significance of student‐led initiatives in PhD development.

A case study is presented utilizing Kolb's model of learning from experience to identify with student‐led research training within the PhD process.

The experiential role of the student in the development of their personal doctoral training and the resultant social interactions thereof, remain as important as the more structured supervisor‐student relationship and other forms of doctoral training within the PhD research process.

This paper contributes new insights into the process of how PhD students can become more empowered by the process of “doing” a PhD, rather than being confined to their own specific discipline, whilst offering future recommendations for students embarking upon PhD research.

A review of the 3rd International Conference on Interlending and Document Supply at the National Library of Hungary in Budapest from 29 March to 1 April, 1993, and of the concurrent UNESCO workshop on East‐West information transfer. Developments in networking will move interlending and document supply from their present peripheral position in library services to centre stage, although the charges are part of a long‐established and continuing process, rather than a dramatic departure from past practice. Outlines the reasons why electronic information will continue to become more competitive than traditionally published sources and discusses some of the consequences of change. In the process of change Eastern Europe is well placed to benefit from Western development and, already, shows signs of making more substantial progress. Makes suggestions for individual and institutional actions.

The purpose of this paper is to share a personal perspective on the 2011 Academy of Management meeting held in San Antonio, Texas. It explores the author's experience of the conference theme of “West meets East: Enlightening, Balancing and Transcending” as well as providing a doctoral student's overall reflections of a major conference.

The paper uses a constructivist perspective in order to reflect upon conference experiences. Observations and the gathering of conference materials helped inform the approach.

This paper argued that the Academy of Management Annual meeting is likely to have a lasting impact on the author. The author was inspired to continue to discover how to become an engaged scholar and practitioner, as well as broadening her understanding of East‐West management practices and cultures.

This paper has value as it presents a personal perspective of a first‐year doctoral student attending her first large, international conference.

This paper aims to share reflections on a collaborative researcher development initiative in Malaysia – the Borneo Research Education Conference (BREC) series. Although the immediate focus is on graduate students, the intention is to trigger wider discussions of researcher development theory in the context of policy and practice in the region.

The paper takes a reflection-on-action approach. Reflecting on experience and sharing the lessons learned in a variety of contexts is vital for the development of this emerging field.

Introducing researcher development programs requires careful consideration of the social, institutional and practical contexts in which it takes place. Although transformation of the field is a long-term process, this process can start with small intentional practices.

The analyses and recommendations arising from the BREC experience are context-specific and therefore cannot be generalised. However, the paper offers guidance for other researcher development initiatives, especially in contexts where the field is not well established.

Deliberately designed practices, such as including a broad range of researchers and creating a safe space for active engagement in developmental activities, can have a positive impact on participant’s researcher identities, self-confidence and sense of belonging.

Policymakers are encouraged to consider a more inclusive notion of researcher development, focussing both on the product and the process of doctoral education.

Documenting and sharing reflections of a researcher development initiative in a “developing country” context allows for the comparing and contrasting of experiences in other settings.

The authors write as three education practitioner-researchers with different disciplinary and professional backgrounds and locations, and who met through their involvement in comparative and international education (CIE). The authors’ connections with each other, and with CIE, have grown through their engagement with their regional society, Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES). This engagement has spanned the transition of the society from the Australia and New Zealand CIES (ANZCIES) to a more regionally representative identity. In this discussion paper, the authors set out to trace intersections of personal, shared, and collective “becomings” as CIE practitioner-researchers, through vignettes over the arc of these past seven years since their first meetings. The authors connect their observations and reflections about annual conference locations and themes visited during this period of accelerated decolonization of OCIES, through topics salient in contemporary CIE and wider debates: identification, identities, and positioning, including ethnic, gendered, and racial dimensions and discriminations, as markers of identification. The authors engage with concepts of decolonization, foreign-ness, and insider/outsider/neither formulations. Discussion reflects on their coming to know each other, CIE, theirselves, and their praxis. Among and around these spatial and temporal locations, the authors situate observations and reflections that have variously influenced, marked, and spanned their early career relationships and sharing, with reference to global and regional CIE works. These reflections accompany their own published, and fresh, perspectives in this sense-making and sharing of their discussions, ongoing, with CIE readers as a wider audience (Fonua, 2021; McCormick, 2017; Shah et al., 2017; Spratt & Coxon, 2020).

The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the fact that conferences for professionals rely on massive one‐way communication and hence produce little learning for delegates – and to introduce an alternative, the “learning conference”, that involves delegates in fun and productive learning processes.

A typical full‐day conference is analyzed. It has six hours of podium talk and twenty‐five minutes for delegates to become involved. What model of learning can possibly lie behind this? The transfer model, which assumes learners to be empty vessels. An alternative view is that conference delegates are active professionals in search of inspiration, and they also want to share knowledge with their peers at the conference. A theory of the conference as a forum for mutual inspiration and human co‐flourishing is proposed, as are four design principles for a learning conference: presentations must provide concise input; the conference host must introduce processes that help delegates; interpret the input in the light of their ongoing concerns; talk about their current projects; and share knowledge with the other delegates.

Six learning processes for use during conferences are described: individual reflection; the buzz dyad; “You have won two consultants, free of charge”; facilitated group work; the knowledge exchange; and lunch with gaffer tape.

This paper introduces learning theory and learning techniques into an educational context which has resisted innovation, the professional conference. It offers alternatives to wall‐to‐wall lecturing: some simple processes for involving delegates so as to help them derive inspiration from the material presented and from each other.

This paper introduces the other papers in this issue, describing and arguing for the context in which they were written – a conference that was, unusually, based in conversation rather than reporting through the presentation of papers: and a refereeing process that continued after the initial presentation (at the conference) of the work reported, thus allowing responses to critical comments. Many of our authors do not come from scientific backgrounds, and writing papers such as we are used to is a novel experience to, and discipline for, them.

The organisation and structure of the conference and the processes of refereeing involved are described; and the argument is made that the particularities of each are more cybernetic than the more familiar arrangements.

The conference processes were greatly valued by the authors. This is evident in the papers presented in this volume, although the convention of presenting only the final form of the paper may mean it is only evident to those who have been involved in the process of writing and refereeing.

The limitations of the approach presented here are a combination of what we can imagine (supported by hard work) and the cultural willingness of funding sources to accept the unfamiliar.

The contents of this volume, that form an outcome of the conference, show it is possible and interesting to create a “non‐standard” conference based in conversation, which searches for new questions rather than reporting answers to old ones: and that papers produced within a conversational process of refereeing and discussion allow both development of research‐in‐writing, and a good quality outcome. We can and should meet in “better” ways.

The conference and papers associated with it show that meetings in which a conversational approach is taken can be viable, not only as academic occasions but in their ability to generate papers of quality. This opens the academic world to different types of meeting and different ways of associating.

The value of this paper lies in the arguments made concerning conferences and refereeing processes. The originality is in the way these are presented as the embodiment of cybernetic understandings and processes (thus realising a cybernetics of cybernetics). The quality of the introduction is enriched by frequent references to material of generation and of record that exists as the legacy of the conference “Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathematics – A Meta‐Disciplinary Conversation” at frequently cited urls on the conference web site. The evidence is there, as well as in this volume.