Feedback
Eva Amsen
Thursday, 20 March 2008 21:16 UTC
How did you experience the first SciBarCamp? Any tips/feedback for the organizers? Would you like to be involved in the next SciBarCamp?
There was a session on this on Sunday afternoon, and in the first few minutes someone suggested having the days run from 10-6 instead of 9-5 and go straight to dinner. As the latecomers dripped into the room, two of them both independently suggested the exact same thing. So we got that message loud and clear =)
Anything else?
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Replies
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If the sessions went till 6 then it would be nice to have dinner after that on site. I realize that this is dependent on resources/sponsorship but having a dinner all together right at the conference location would have been a nice way to keep everyone together for a little bit longer for that bit of extra networking!
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Hi Eva,
I would suggest in advance to decide on how many 60 min/40 min/20 min events you want to have, and schedule the parallel sessions such that they start and end in sync. If there are shorter performances or so that wouldn’t fill even 20 mins, put them together to one session. Plus I would recommend to add 5-10 min after each session, so people can change rooms, get a coffee, or just in case somebody absolutely can’t finish a sentence. Also, in case there are topics that have been suggested prior to the actual meeting and turned out to attract a lot of interest, why not put them on the schedule already, it would set some frame in which the slots can then be filled up. And yeah, I’d like to be involved in the next Camp :-)
Best,
B.
PS: Well, about the starting time, as far as I am concerned nobody should speak a word before noon anyway ;-)
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”I would suggest in advance to decide on how many 60 min/40 min/20 min events you want to have, and schedule the parallel sessions such that they start and end in sync.”
That makes sense. We tried to accommodate for people who said they could only present in a certain part of day as well, but if the duration of the time slots is known in advance, people can adapt to that and just work around it from the start (eg. “I can only present on Sunday afternoon, but there are only 40 minute slots available then. Guess I can’t do a 60 minute things then, or have to find someone to combine two 20 minute sessions.”)
That might work! Thanks! -
I found the session planning process cumbersome. I come from the podcast world and the two years of Podcamp Toronto had people editing a wiki to add their session well before the actual event. People could team up easily this way on their own, and it allowed the organizers to create the schedule a number of days in advance to iron out any conflicts. It’s a model that has worked well. Another interesting bit with Podcamp Toronto was that the sessions were streamed live online and preserved for later viewing by attendee or non-attendee alike. The venue at Ryerson U was particularly suited to this though since it’s a media school.
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Whoops, yhat last one was by me. I must’ve hit the Anon toggle inadvertantly.
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We looked into the possibility of live streaming (and/or just having everything on video), but in the end it fell through because we didn’t have cameras and didn’t really know how, and other things came up that were more important.
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If we had more sponsorship next time, I would like to have the additional rooms for the whole time (or most of the time) – that way we would be able to accomodate everyone’s session, without having to pack them all in to a couple hours in the afternoon. Then we could just alot a full hour to each session, and if sessions finished early people could go join another or relax for a while. I think this was how it was done at SciFoo (any SciFoo-ers who could confirm this?).
On the subject of deciding the program in advance via a wiki: this would have a lot of benefits (although I think it would still be good to have some face-to-face interaction about the schedule). A lot of our participants were not heavy users of the internet, though, so I’m not sure how we would have made sure their input was incorporated. Any ideas on this?
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Timothy Campbell: thanks! I am going to post your link and suggestion over at the Science Blogging 2008 forum thread on format, just to make sure everyone sees it’s not necessary to re-invent the wheel.
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