Guidelines for Session Organizers

The oral presentation sessions not only offer presenters a great opportunity to highlight their current research, get feedback, and make connections that can lead to future collaboration, but also provide session organizers with a chance to showcase collaborative ventures, the work of grad students in their department or lab, or the status of an agency's management program. to help encourage a particularly engaging conference program and in recognition of the effort that goes into soliciting speakers and putting together a cohesive, informative session, this year we will be giving a rebate of 50% off of the conference registration fee to all session organizers who successfully recruit enough presentations to fill a session. **Please note that as a relatively small nonprofit that cannot afford to subsidize the conference and already sets the conference fees as low as possible with the intent of making it accessible to all who might wish to attend, and that since the majority of attendees are presenters, we cannot afford to offer discounts to presenters.

Those who have a proposal for a session topic, should contact office@eaglehill.us with a brief description and at least a tentative title. Our expectation is that session organizers will then actively solicit presentations for their session (organizers can and often do, but are not required to, present in their own session).

In addition, we ask that organizers be flexible in including talks that they may not have solicited, but which fit in with the session topic (every year we receive a number of unsolicited talks, which we group in with already proposed sessions, or organize into new sessions, as most apppropriate). Note that the typical session consist of 4 presentations, but the conference schedule can also allow for some sessions consisting of 3 or 5 talks as well (a panel discussion could replace one or more of the persentation slots in a session). All presentations are alloted 20 minutes (including time for Q & A, so it is suggested that the presenters aim for no more than 18 minutes of actual presentation) regardless of how many talks are in a session (i.e., 4-talk session slots are 20 minutes longer than 3-talk session slots). Furthermore, if there is strong interest in a topic, it is possible to have even more talks that would be divided up among a double session on that topic (i.e., 6 talks would be arranged as two 3-talk sessions, 7 talks as a 3-talk session and a 4-talk session, etc.), sometimes with the title of each session modified to reflect the particular content, and sometimes each keeping the original proposed title with a "I" and "II" added to differentiate the sessions. If you are unfamiliar with our conference, you can check out the archives of previous year's programs to see how this has worked out in the past.

It is important that the session organizers be aware of the deadline for submission of presentations and remind those they have solicited for their session that they need to send us their abstract and register for the conference no later than February 18th. In order to organize all of the presentations into a schedule that works for all in a timely manner, this is a firm deadline. Please also emphasize that they need to alert us to any scheduling restrictions they may have that would limit when they are available to present (there is a field on the registration form specifically for providing such info).

Please also direct potential presenters to carefully review our Guidelines for Oral Presenters.

We ask that session organizers provide an update by February 11th to Keith at keithg@eaglehill.us, providing a list of the presenters (name and email) and at least a tentative title of their presentations they are expecting for the session. This information will help ensure that we receive and correctly assign those talks to their intended session.

Once the deadline for submission has passed and he has had a chance to sort through and organize them all, Keith will send each session organizer a list of those talks (names, title, and abstract) we have received for his/her session, including both solicited and perhaps some unsolicited talks. The organizers will then need to let Keith know your preference for the ordering of the talks and confirm who will be the session moderator (most often is the session organizer[s], but someone else could be tapped for that role).

Once a draft schedule has been crafted that seems to best organize all of the presentations into sessions and all the sessions into particular time slots that works around all of the scheduling constraints indicated by presenters, we will first send it out to the session organizers for their review, and then out to all the presenters, prior to publicly posting the final schedule. Our goal is to have that final schedule available by the third week of March at the latest.