Collecting questions and notes for each talk; breakout sessions (was: Various updates, prep notes for speakers)

[Karl Voit]

Sacha Chua (sacha@sachachua.com) wrote:

> > > I like pushing all questions to a pad; I also like being flexible and
> > > staying out of the way of presenters who may be pulling things
> > > directly from IRC.  The only obvious danger I see would be if a
> >
> 
> I'd recommend pad first, then IRC if the speaker feels confident about
> monitoring both, since the IRC conversations tend to move swiftly and go on
> tangents. IRC is great for reading the room, though. If we pull off the
> extended Q&A, there might be multiple IRC threads in the same channel. I
> wonder how we can make it manageable...

As you might have notices last year, I'm a very big fan of public
pads for collectively writing show-notes, comments, questions and so
forth. This reduces personal effort to a minimum due to the work of
many volunteers with the same aim/goal.

Etherpad has a very low entry barrier. Only people who won't
activate JavaScript might be against it. So I think that two
channels for collecting questions could be a good approach - I think
this also worked well last year: IRC and one Etherpad for the event.

I can't comment on BBB since I never used it myself.

The thing with after-talk-sessions that would worry me is that I
most probably want to attend the follow-up talk while the
breakout-session is ongoing. I'm not totally convinced myself about
this. How about the idea that we ask the people giving talks that
they suggest a time-slot in the upcoming days for those
breakout-sessions? Those slots should be arranged that way, that
most attendees of the conference (we did not discuss attendee survey
yet) are able to attend in reasonable time of the day. I presume
this is USA and Europe.

-- 
Karl Voit