my reflections on next symposia

Hi to everybody.

Since it's still fresh in my mind I'm going to utter my feelings about
yesterday's event and how next ones could be improved.
First of all, I'm happy that despite the initial mishaps we were able to
carry it out decently well.
Second, I think there is plenty of room for improving.
Third, thank you to those that participated and to those that spoke
during the event.

Pro's

1. a two hour slot is good so that many people can participate without
clogging their schedule
2. the panel run on the basis a few predefined questions is also a good
thing
3. good to have a page with papers, slides, captions.
4. it's a good idea to provide participants with an individual code so
that zakim can tell the name of the person that is speaking or that
raised hand.

Con's

1. initial presentations were too long. Next time I would ask authors to
give a short presentation of themselves (1 minute long) and that is. The
end result is to give more space to the panel and to the global Q&A part.
2. 1000-word long abstracts are ok. Next time I would ask authors to
provide also a 2-3 slide summary of their work (for participants that do
not feel like they have to read all the abstracts), but not ask authors
to present the slides.
3. 11 participants were too many; next time I would go for about 8
people. This should also increase the quality and the cohesiveness of
the event.
4. the panel and the final Q&A part were ok, but there was too little
interaction between panelists and also between panelists and public. It
might have had something to do with the machinery for raising hands,
handling "the mic", following a somewhat rigid schedule for who was
going to talk when. I feel this was the major defect of yesterday's
event. We need to make these events more interactive.
5. in addition to a person that leads/moderates the event, we need at
least another person that handles zakim. And both these persons should
have a backup so that if they suddenly disappear the backup person can
continue the event.
6. next time I would ask speakers to join the conference 30 minutes in
advance and make sure that their settings is ok for talking and hearing.
7. it could be good to provide participants with another info channel
(like a twitter code) to let them to tell something to
chairs/panelists/audience.

Giorgio

Received on Tuesday, 6 December 2011 11:00:35 UTC