Conferences: how it could be improved

As a physicist I attended many scientific conferences. This is how I know it's expensive. Registration fee is usually several hundred dollars. This fraction of the total cost. The largest piece of housing and travel. Often the costs of the Conference in Europe, common in the United States for about $ 3,000. The same is true for people from Europe, attending our conferences. Costs of participants from other continents – Australia, Asia and Africa — probably much greater.

I've been my experience that, apart from being expensive, are not as effective as they could be. Most time is spent listening to presentations normally passive instead of active discussion before reading the reports. Most participants to benefit from the ability to read and consider submissions at home, rather than just read the abstracts, Conference.

How to improve the situation by Conference organizers? What follows is a collection of suggestions:

1) require the submission of preliminary versions of presentations of papers, rather than just abstracts, an early example, no later than three weeks before the Conference.

2) Conference presentations, including contents of posters available online, the online conference site. This should be done as soon as possible, for example, no later than two weeks before the Conference.

3) organize a preliminary discussion of the presentations at the Conference site on the Internet, in advance, for example, shortly after he made the first two or three papers. This can be done several ways, using the Internet.

4) reduce the oral presentations. A typical presentation of the 30-minute, for example, you can allocate five minutes for a summary and you can use the time left for questions and discussion. Likely to be more useful than offers much longer and very limited time to ask questions, its now.

What are the advantages of this approach?

Participants will have time to think about and discuss the content of the Conference. Most of the time will be spent on active participation, rather than passive listening. This gives attendees the opportunity to increase the active participation of interaction benefits to attend a Conference on the site.

You can resolve some controversial issues before the Conference will address remaining issues only.

For practical reasons, some people may decide to participate online, registration fees only and incur no travel expenses.

Ludwik Kowalski (PhD)

Link to my own website for free, "the former Communist diary: thoughts, emotions, reality," is

http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life/intro.html

Link to the interview at:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/interview1.html

I'm 80 years old and I want to share what you know and think about, before it is too late.

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