Should the Future of AIS Conferences be Hybrid?

Academic conferences provide a needed opportunity for academic community members to come together and share ideas. COVID-19 forced AIS to host conferences remotely for two years. From that experience, we learned a few things about virtualizing our conference activities including the potential for virtual conferences to widen participation and membership. In this paper, we reflect on that learning through a lens informed by reviewing published work on conference hybridization. We also make recommendations for how future conference chairs can think about AIS conferences. Changing how our conferences are delivered is risky, but simply returning to the old normal is also risky. As an association studying IT, discovering and championing the role of technology in conference experiences would seem to be a risk worth taking.