[FOSS4G2016] Tracks/Workshops/Sessions

[Christian Willmes]

Hi,

Am 06.11.2015 um 13:13 schrieb till.adams at fossgis.de:
> What is a special "track"? Is it a conglomerat of talks within one 
> session? Is it a "topic dedicated day" ? How do we organize this?
> ... and here comes my idea:
> I've just been in Berlin on a two day symposium on "Copernicus" (an 
> european remote sensing programme delivering Open Data ;-)). Their 
> sessions, lasting 90 minutes, were called "workshops" and moderated by 
> a chair. Inside the worksohps, they had 3-4 (short) talks and tried to 
> generate a discussion afterwards. All these workshops were dedicated 
> to a speciific topic, such as "Copernicus and Business" or "Copernicus 
> and Desaster Management" and so on. The chair was obviously 
> responsible for the presenters  in his/her workshop and did more a 
> session chair in our sessions did. S/he really moderated the whole 
> workshop with their own words.
> To be honest: I really liked that format, although this would mean, 
> that there are talks, which are not selected by community and 
> ProgComm. Maybe such "sessions/tracks" should be selected by 
> community/ProgComm before?
> We might dedicate one of our session rooms for one/two/three days to 
> these specialized "topic driven workshops" or however we name it..... 
I think this thematic grouping of talks is a good idea, and in 
Nottingham 2013 we already had something like this, they were called 
"Sessions", having a Session Chair each (see 
http://2013.foss4g.org/conf/programme/index.html). I think in Portland 
the talks were also grouped thematically, but it was not that clear from 
the program and they had no session chairs (at least for most sessions I 
attended).

This "Session-ing" makes sense and has several advantages:
- It combines related talks into a Session (reducing the inter-session 
room switching from the audience),
- A session chair introduces each talk/speaker, which is always nice and 
also helpful for audience and speakers alike,
- The session chair has an eye on the time the speaker takes, and also 
the responsibility for staying in time,
- The session chair moderates the Q&A, and maybe starts with a question 
if there are at first no questions from the audience

Something also taken into account here, is that we would need a lot of 
session chair volunteers, but in Nottingham that worked out, so why not 
in Bonn.

Cheers,
Christian