Re: [Tccc] Regarding presentation quality

I'm not sure how many large conferences you have organized, but my general experience is that people will leave during the last day, regardless of what program you put there. If you close in the mid-to-late afternoon, some people will leave early to catch a flight, since they don't want to spend another night in the hotel. If you close at lunch, people will leave the night before. (I won't mention the fraction of attendees that squeezes in some sightseeing on the last day...) If you get to organize an event, maybe you can try out your idea of scheduling the social event at the end, and get feedback from the attendees. Experiments are always a good thing, particularly if the results are captured in some formal way beyond anecdotes.

Henning

On Dec 6, 2009, at 7:04 AM, Miroslav Skoric wrote:

> Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
>
>> (1) logistics: if you want a plaque, you can't wait until after all the presentations;
>
> Henning, I am not sure if I understood the point above. If you meant about a conference board making decision on award recipients, I do not see any reason why a conference could not finish with, say, a half an hour 'award & closing' session (I suggest it to be, well, after the last afternoon's coffee break, so to allow conference management to fill-in diplomas). When it comes to plaques with engraved author names or similar, they could be given the next morning or so. You know what: If I were a 'golden' plaque recipient, be sure that I'd stay another day in the area just to get my plaque, no problem at all :-)
>
> In addition, I do not see any reason why conference banquets (and award ceremonies) happen so often in the middle of an event. Wouldn't it better to finish with all presentations and perform conference dinner the last day? Everybody would be fully relaxed and not only those who have spoken until then :-)
>
>> (2) timing: often, the best-paper awardee is scheduled early in the conference, to avoid accidentally scheduling it as the last paper on Friday afternoon;
>
> Here I also missed the idea. Why the best paper awardee should be scheduled to speak early? Just to give him/her a chance to speak in front of the full audience? Why? That kind of treatment may suggest that "the last paper on Friday afternoon" is the worst one, that does not deserve to be even heard :-) Ok, I joked here. But I am serious when think that the best paper award should not have any special scheduling. (If it is awarded for the quality of content, it does not matter when it is presented in the conference. Otherwise, that may implicitly suggest that the most important presentations are early in the conference, so that might lead to less and less populated rooms the 2nd, 3rd day or so.)
>
> Question: How to prevent empty rooms the last conference day? Answer: Put the awarded papers there, accompanied with one of the plenaries. (Why on earth all the plenaries must go in a row at the very beginning?)
>
>> (3) impact: the legitimate reason - if the best paper award is meant to recognize the paper most likely to have a long-term impact, presentation is not really a criterion. Just because the presenter was a nervous PhD student who mumbled the presentation read off a sheet word-by-word (has happened...), this doesn't diminish the technical impact or elegance.
>
> Ok on that. I know what is a nervous presenter. It is nobody's fault to be nervous on stage or so, but my initial idea was that a presenting *author* should be capable to 'guard' his/her statements written in a paper, by provocative discussion or debate or questions that continue after the presentation. My point was that a presenter should give a clear 'proof' of knowing what he/she has written about, and not just read the text from the slides, as many presenters do.
>
> Unfortunately, so many PhD students (not to mention undergraduates) are not advised by their mentors to avoid "presenting" their papers by reading the text from the proceedings or so! In that case, for me it is least important the 'quality of the paper content', but such material should not have been sent to a conference but rather to a journal editor instead.
>
> In addition, so many times I saw paper presenters (professors!) who did not address to the audience at all, but have read their slides (I could read their slides by myself, if I wanted to). When I listen to a speaker, I want him/her to persuade me that a described area is really of significant interest and motivate me to study his/her paper in the proceedings (later, at home) more thoroughly than the others. That I see as one of the most important features of the conferences.
>
> Miroslav
>
>

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