I was in Fribourg for the 2019 Swiss Geoscience Meeting, and I was part of the newly expanded options for human geography. In 2018, there was only one series of sessions for human geographers, but this year our presence ballooned and we had three parallel streams. It was really well attended too, for the most part, and it’s nice to see that kind of growth year over year.

I hosted a session this year and, as usual when I host, I try consciously to learn and improve for next time. Here are a few of the lessons I learned this time. Less theoretical than practical and organizational.

It’s really basic: people appreciate when you keep to time, and this is your job as session organizer. You have to be a little strict here, and this isn’t a level of discipline that I particularly enjoy. And yet, it’s awfully disrespectful to everyone else to mismanage the time. Worse, it has knock on effects that spill over to the rest of the day.

In other words, if you manage your little garden, it makes for a healthier and more beneficial ecosystem overall. I’m not in the position yet where I can make any decisions for the ecosystem, but I can – at least a little – manage that garden.

I’ve found that it makes disciplining easier if I warn the speakers beforehand, via email, that I will manage time fairly strictly. And then, when I start the session, I make an announcement to the fact that I will be keeping time strictly out of a sense of respect to everyone.

Still, there are power dynamics at play. I spoke with a PhD student who was organizing a session and she could not find the courage to stop a tenured professor whose talk went over the scheduled 20 minutes… at which point he opened for questions.

Also, if I’m ever in the position of organizing a stream or even an entire conference, I think it’s a good idea to leave passing periods. Even 5 minutes between sessions would be great. I couldn’t start my session exactly on time because people hadn’t finished coming into the room yet.

Basically, the lesson is to allow room for flexibility in the scheduling, but then run the ship as rigorously and respectfully as you can.

I think another question is whether 15 minute presentations with 5 minutes for questions is really the best format to engage in meaningful discussion. This is an important debate, I think, but also one for another day.

In the meantime, a good workaround I think would be to leave enough buffer space and room for coffee/drink chats, so that the conversation can continue after the presentations are through.