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SCIENTIFIC "SPEED DATING" - A REPORT ON SCB'S EXPERIMENT WITH A NEW PRESENTATION FORMAT FOR SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS

During its 2006 annual meeting, SCB broke free from the hidebound shackles of tradition to try a new format for oral presentations - speed presentations.

We experimented with the speed presentation format in two separate sessions. One session focused largely on biologically-oriented topics, and one session focused on socially-oriented topics. Each session was two hours long. In the first hour, 15 presenters were given three minutes each to present their key ideas and results. In the second hour, presenters stationed themselves at separate tables where they could interact with audience members interested in learning more about their work.

Our hypotheses in entering this experiment were that the speed sessions would (a) expose audience members to a wide range of presentations that they might not otherwise attend, and (b) allow for more intimate, meaningful discussion and interaction than normally occurs during oral presentation sessions.

A total of 290 people attended the two sessions, with more people (195) attending the second, "social" session on 28 June. The discrepancy in attendance may have been due to high interest in socially-oriented topics, or the positive "buzz" created by the first session. As part of this experimental approach to presentations, session organizers asked participants, both presenters and audience members, to submit a brief evaluation questionnaire. Evaluations were received from more than 60% of participants. Evaluation responses were similar for both sessions, unless otherwise indicated below.

An overwhelming majority (85% of respondents across the two sessions) indicated that SCB should continue to offer sessions in the speed presentation format. A large majority of participants indicated that the overall quality of the sessions was good (59%) or excellent (22%), and almost 2/3 of respondents said they would probably or definitely consider submitting a presentation for a speed session themselves. More than half of respondents said that the best balance to pursue for future meetings would be mostly traditional sessions with some speed sessions, whereas about a quarter of respondents indicated they would prefer mostly speed sessions and some traditional sessions.

Attendees of the two sessions generally agreed that the logistics of the sessions worked well in terms of timing and length, although in the comments section a number of respondents suggested increasing the length of the individual speed presentation from three minutes to four or five minutes. About a quarter of respondents felt that the breadth of presentation topics could be narrowed and the number of presenting authors decreased.

Our initial interest in the speed presentation format emerged not only from the desire to pack a variety of presentations into an efficient format, but also to provide an opportunity for networking and discussion among presenters and audience members. Discussion in both sessions appeared lively. In the second session on 28 June, more than 100 people were still present and engaged with the presenters more than 40 minutes into the discussion period. A fair number of respondents (41% across both sessions) reported that they made useful contacts and networked to some degree as a result of the speed sessions, but only 15% said that they made useful contacts or networked "more than a bit" or "a lot."

One concern the organizers had going in was the distribution of audience members among the presenters during the discussion period; would some presenters, particularly comparatively well-known presenters, be surrounded by people wanting to talk to them, and others left with few or none? The distribution of audience members was uneven, but noticeably less so during the second session, which had a greater number of attendees, and where the organizers encouraged attendees to circulate at 20 and 40 minutes into the discussion period. This is an ongoing concern, but is also not absent from traditional oral presentation sessions, where the audience can ebb and flow in relation to "hot" topics or well-known presenters.

Overall, we were very pleased with the results of this experiment. There even was interesting press coverage in the 28 July 2006 issue of Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i47/47a00402.htm) and the 29 June 2006 Nature newsblog (http://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/2006/06/scb_need_for_speed.html). The organizers of the 2007 annual meeting will orchestrate up to four of these sessions (see page 10 for details). We encourage you to consider presenting in or attending these sessions.

Nick Salafsky, Nora Bynum, Kent Redford, and Mac Hunter

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