You know how you used to take your conference notes on the notepad in the conference satchel?
What did you do with them? Mine are sitting in a pile on the bookshelf, along with all the abstract books from the conferences I've been to. I don't think I've looked back through the notes more than 4 or 5 times, and I think I've looked up an abstract that I kinda remembered twice.
You might have moved on to taking your notes on a laptop. Do you print them out? Or file them away in a "conference notes" folder? or are they somewhere in your general documents folder with an obscure name like "Brisbane HIV Conf Sep 15.docx"? I bet they probably don't get looked at much more than the notepads.
I've moved to taking my conference notes on twitter. It takes some practice belting out a 140 character tweet for important ideas in each presentation, but it has the great benefit of making it accessible - to others at the conference, but also to people who might be following at home, by following the official conference tag.
You can then use a tool like storify to aggregate your tweets into a single webpage - for easy sharing, and to refer back to (or not) later on. My tip if you do this, is to aggregate them each night. I tried to go back to my AIDS2014 tweets after a couple of weeks and it was much harder (impossible) to do easily.
Here's the collections of my tweets from the conference for you.
I hope to see more people doing it next year; my request for the organisers is to make the official #hashtag shorter - how about #ashm16 or at least #hivaids16 please?
Day 1: https://storify.com/trentyarwood/hiv-aids-conference-2015-day-1
Day 2: https://storify.com/trentyarwood/hiv-aids-conference-day-2
Day 3: https://storify.com/trentyarwood/australian-hiv-aids-conference-2015-day-3