How Slack connected conference-goers and changed the experience at Portland's XOXO Festival
Why Slack could be the future of conferences — We go to conferences to meet people, whether for business or personal reasons, and yet often I meet far fewer than I hope to.
Context & Ripple Effects
By 2015, Slack had already proven it could restructure communication inside companies — the same tool newsrooms would later use to let journalists organize against management and that The Atlantic credited with flattening workplace hierarchies. The XOXO experiment extends that pattern from the office to the conference floor, where the stated problem is the same one Slack solved at work: too many people in the same room, not enough of them actually talking.
First-order effects
- XOXO attendees get a live channel for meeting each other before and during the festival, directly attacking the gap the article names — going to conferences to meet people and meeting far fewer than hoped.
- Slack gains an early proof point outside the enterprise, demonstrating its group-messaging model works for ad-hoc communities, not just teams with a shared employer.
Second-order effects
- Other conference organizers face pressure to offer equivalent backchannels or risk their events feeling less connected than competitors' — the same dynamic that pushed newsrooms to adopt Slack once peers did.
- Persistent post-event channels turn single-weekend festivals into ongoing communities, changing what attendees are effectively paying for and raising retention stakes for organizers.
Third-order effects
- If gatherings keep adopting always-on chat, conferences shift from discrete events toward durable social networks organized around them — a structural change echoed by Slack's own evolution into cross-company messaging with Connect DMs and Verified Organizations, which formalizes exactly these loose, multi-party communities.
The trend: Group chat is expanding from a workplace tool into the connective tissue of communities of all kinds — conferences included — a trajectory traced across Slack's ten-year arc from startup darling to Salesforce acquisition.