[FOSS4G2016] Tracks/Workshops/Sessions

[till.adams at fossgis.de]

Christian,

what you list in my eyes is "normal duty" for every session chair.

Just to clarify this, because what I meant is far more.

The "dedicated-workshop-chair" is responsible for the whole "workshop". 
Of course s/he must keep the time and introduce the speakers. But s/he 
also comes to LOC/ProgComm with his/her idea for the topic, invites 
speakers fitting into the topic and session and so on and so on. For 
this we do not seek chairs later, the chairs take over the initiative.

Of course we need also "session" chairs for the "normal track" - and of 
course we need some of them, but that's another story.

Till



> 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
>
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