If Claris Engage is back, why do we need Pause?
Spoiler: they’re complementary, not competing.
I just returned from this year’s PauseOnError FileMaker Summer Camp, a gathering of Claris FileMaker developers in the remote woods of northern Georgia.
Engage took a “pause,” but now it’s back
Those of you familiar with the Claris ecosystem know that Claris Engage, the industry conference sponsored by Claris, the creators of FileMaker, started back up in February of 2024 after a pandemic-induced five-year hiatus. For most of its existence, Pause has run parallel to Claris’s conferences, but from 2021 - 2023 Pause was the only in-person FileMaker conference in the United States.
With Claris Engage back on the scene, why do we still need Pause?
One way to think about it is to imagine the conferences as college courses. Claris Engage is a survey course while Pause is more of a senior seminar.
Let’s use geology as an example. A geology survey course like “Intro to Earth’s Environments,” provides a broad overview of the field of geology and current areas of research and interest within the discipline. Survey courses tend to have many students who are instructed through presentations and lectures. A survey course helps students learn about the field as a whole.
On the other hand, a seminar class digs deeper into a particular topic or niche within the field. A seminar topic could be something like “Great Lakes Hydrology”. This will be a smaller group of students, with an instructional format that is based in discussion, hands-on experiments, and field trips.
Engage: the survey course
Claris Engage has a packed schedule with two days of back-to-back presentations from experts around the community. It’s a great place to hear all about what’s happening across the Claris ecosystem, to meet hundreds of people, and to take a lot of notes about things to follow up on when you’re back home.
At Claris Engage, most sessions are presentations and demonstrations. They may have sample files you can experiment with as homework. Every time I’ve attended Claris Engage, I’ve come home with piles of notes about people to follow up with, techniques to explore, and strategies to research further.
PauseOnError: the seminar course
In contrast, Pause offers only a few structured times for facilitated conversations, followed by plentiful open-ended space. There are less than 150 people, and everyone eats, sleeps, and works in the same physical location for the week. At Pause, you might attend a conversation about account management on the first day and decide to go deep on that topic, bringing that lens to a later conversation about mental health at work, and then seeking out some of the people you saw at those two sessions for a long talk next to the campfire.
This kind of spaciousness can lead to a phenomenon I call middle-distance thinking. This is when we have loosely structured conversations with people who are our peers, and they somehow seem to magically help us solve problems that resist more pointed attention.
Do what works for you
Both Engage and Pause offer valuable opportunities to learn, but they are different and attract different (but overlapping) audiences. Some of us enjoy the relative quiet of the north Georgia hills, where we can compare notes with a colleague while hiking to the waterfall. Others crave the networking opportunity of mingling with hundreds of people all within a few days. Many of us find that some years we need one thing, and other years we need something different.
