[Sigcabinet] ASIST Technical Sessions Reorganization

[Pascal Calarco]

This is a great initiative, KT, and I am glad y'all are taking this on. 
  A long time in coming, many would agree.

I have always thought of the purpose of the SIG-sponsored sessions to be 
along the lines of what Dick has suggested here as well -- applied and 
practical work that is situated around a compelling current problem 
area.  I think what I have seen in the last couple of years is that more 
panels are being submitted by academics, which has led to some of them 
trying to sneak in essentially contributed paper sessions, which we have 
fought hard to ferret out during the review process.

There have been some in recent years that are trying to explore new 
formats and approaches to the traditional SIG session model.  I think of 
Deborah Swain's SIG KM 'speed dating' session a year or two back, the 
innovative, (if perhaps somewhat overambituous) SIG USE history session 
at this year's meeting, and several others that I can't remember 
specifics of that have tried to innovate in recent years.  Most of these 
exploratory works have been positive, I think, in making more compelling 
and interesting sessions.

Dick is quite right that I do not think SIG Cabinet in the recent past 
has provided much in the way of guidance or suggestions in how SIGs (and 
others) put together these technical sessions; I do think we could 
encourage them to use some other format to make them more interactive, 
participatory and lively, perhaps even going so far to prescribe one or 
more formats that they need to structure their technical session around; 
same-old session format just won't do any more (as KT suggests below). 
Great idea.

Boy, I think the idea of a pecha kucha model for a technical session 
would be an interesting idea to try out.  Maybe this could be used for 
the open technical session at Vancouver that we had talked about 
lightening round talks.  It forces the presenter to be concise, 
compelling and cut the content to the absolute essential message so it 
fits into 400 seconds and 20 slides.  It would take some good presenters 
who are willing to be a bit more guerilla to demonstrate this in action, 
but I am sure with some of the BWP, IA or TAG folks this would be very 
doable.  I know there will be some attendees and reviewers who will see 
these types of new formats as "not academic" and unbefitting of 
presentation at ASIS&T but I agree that we need to open up the sessions 
to be lively from their crusty, predictable past.  Some will embrace and 
engage with these new formats and it will sort itself out over time.

I think it will be good for SIGs to have much more competition to get a 
session in at Annual.  I think perhaps too much focus has gone into 
producing many sessions rather than taking a single idea or areas of 
practice and really spending quality time crafting that one session to 
be awesome.

Briefly, I think the idea of compressing ASIS&T Annual to three days is 
a good one.  It will make it a more affordable meeting for many people 
and will almost invariably raise the quality of the sessions since it 
will be a much more competitive meeting to get accepted at.

Holy cow, Dick, I wasn't expecting a complement, so thank you.  I really 
must owe you something that I guess I'll find out soon enough! ;)

Cheers,

   - pascal

On 23/09/09 02:53 PM, Richard Hill wrote:
> I tend to take a more fundamental look at the question.
>
> We have, I think, Contributed Papers for theoretical research.  We rely on
> the panels for practice and applied research.  We rely on SIG/panels for
> timely updates and what is new.
>
> And in fairness, I think we have not done the best job possible in letting
> the SIGs know what we want.  I think panels went more academic after there
> was a generalized push to make panels "better," which was not defined.
> Since that charge was coming form academics, or since most of our members
> are academic in part, panels became academic.
>
> I'll bet there is little perception among the SIGs that that panels are as
> described below.
>
> I think changes are needed in how SIGs are told what we want and in how they
> are reviewed (Pascal has done a great job in shepherding submissions into
> order, and has not usually been the case).
>
> Dick
>
> _____
> Richard B. Hill
> Executive Director
> American Society for Information Science and Technology
> 1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 510
> Silver Spring, MD  20910
> Fax: (301) 495-0810
> Voice: (301) 495-0900
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: sigcabinet-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigcabinet-bounces at asis.org] On
>> Behalf Of KT Vaughan
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 2:28 PM
>> To: Sigcabinet at mail.asis.org; Pascal V. Calarco; 'Gary Marchionini'
>> Subject: [Sigcabinet] ASIST Technical Sessions Reorganization
>>
>> Hi SIG Cabinet Steering Cte, Gary, and Pascal!
>>
>> As promised in the teleconference from way back, I'm starting off our
>> discussion via email of how to revamp the technical sessions aspect of
>> the ASIS&T Annual Meeting.  Pascal, I'm involving you in this because
>> you're co-chair this year, and because you have lots of experience on
>> the topic.  Gary is invited in his role as AM gadfly and
>> President-Elect.  Feel free to ignore if you would like to (the rest of
>> you don't have permission to ignore!).
>>
>> The Board has asked us to propose new ways of organizing SIG-driven
>> content at the Annual Meeting.  Currently these show up as the Technical
>> Sessions.  Those, in turn, tend to be a standard model of a loosely
>> organized set of 3-5 presenters giving talks with question time at the
>> end.  There are some perceived problems with this model:
>> 1: It's boring. (in general) Very little interaction happens with the
>> audience, and if the talks aren't interesting people don't get much out
>> of them.
>> 2: It weights heavily toward academic rather than practical work,
>> towards research rather than practice, and towards older research and
>> completed research.  Not that any of these are bad/good - just that more
>> variation would be desired (speaking as a practitioner who does very
>> little research).
>> 3: Reviewers are used to this model, so they tend to rate different
>> kinds of panels less highly b/c they aren't used to other models.
>> 4: Certain SIGs are good at organizing this kind of session, so they
>> tend to overwhelm other SIGs in quantity of panels proposed and presented.
>>
>> We've been asked to brainstorm and then propose to the Board a different
>> way of running SIG "panels" (for lack of a better word).  One thing the
>> Board has tentatively agreed to is to shorten the overall length of the
>> conference from fourish days (Sunday through Wednesday) to threeish days
>> (Sunday through Tuesday).  The SIG RUSH reception will become a welcome
>> reception, and SIG CON will probably get folded into another reception
>> (likely the President's?).  This means we'll probably go from having
>> 30ish panels to having at most 20.  A current proposal on the table
>> would reduce panels down to 12; I'm lobbying hard to get it up to 18 at
>> least. Given that we have 21 SIGs, that would by necessity mean that
>> unless SIGs cosponsor, some won't have any programming at the AM at all.
>>
>> Ok, so that's the current status.  What we need to do is to think hard
>> about what a good SIG session COULD look like in the ideal world, and
>> then how we can make sure those sessions are the ones that are proposed
>> and presented.  Suggestions at the Board meeting included promoting
>> industry/tech demo sessions, mini-workshops, interactive discussions,
>> pecha kucha sessions, etc.  From a structural perspective, I think it
>> would be interesting to subdivide the panels proposals by type - and
>> declare up front that we'll only be accepting 6 traditional model
>> sessions, 6 of some other type, and 6 of a third type.  Then SIGs can
>> choose which type to submit to, recognizing that it could be a lot
>> harder to get into one type than another.
>>
>> Discussion!?
>>
>> KT
>>
>> PS: So sorry I've been out of touch.  As I think I noted before, I've
>> been sick for weeks, and am finally feeling better.
>>
>> --
>> KTL Vaughan, MSLS, AHIP
>> Pharmacy Librarian
>> UNC-CH Health Sciences Library
>>
>> Clinical Associate Professor of Pharmacy
>> UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy
>>
>> CB 7585
>> University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
>> Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7585
>> Phone: 919 966 8011
>> Fax: 919 966 5592
>> Email: ktlv at email.unc.edu
>>
>>
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