2020-10-28 Retrospective

Owned by Renata McCoy, created
Last updated: Nov 05, 2020 by Philip Jones
3 min read

 

Date

Oct 28, 2020

Team

ESMD/E3SM Meeting Steering Committee

Participants

ESMD/E3SM Meeting participants

Background

Organizing the first fully virtual ESMD/E3SM Meeting was challenging; we strived to create a good experience, a balanced agenda and reasonable logistics. There is definitely room for improvement, and we would like to hear from you about your experience and your thoughts. We are especially interested in your feedback on the overall meeting, its structure, session organization and the poster session.

Please provide your opinion on what went wrong (in “Stop doing” column), what was good (“Keep doing”) and what we should change or add (“Start doing”). We have also added a column for overall impression and additional comments.

If you cannot edit this page, please send an email to esmd-e3smpimeeting@llnl.gov and we will add your voice to the retrospective.

Retrospective

Add your Start doing, Stop doing, Keep doing as well as Overall impression and additional comments.

If you have the same thought as already stated, please add ‘+1’ or add 1 to the existing number.

Start doing

Stop doing

Keep doing

Overall impression and additional comments

Start doing

Stop doing

Keep doing

Overall impression and additional comments

  • Instead of grouping posters based on topic, consider mixing up posters across sessions, so that presenters can participate in discussions on other posters in their topic area.

  • Break up the agenda Confluence page into a page for each day. It was difficult to keep up with it while people edited it frequently. +2

  • It was hard to find the daily links to zoom, since they were not on the agenda. Would be nice to have a single place for that. +3

  • Incorporate 5-10 minute breaks every 1-2 hours. +2

  • Breakout summaries should not be breakout replays. Concision is warranted!

  • It was difficult to navigate the Slack channel. The topic was not intuitive from the naming scheme: DayM-SessionN-BreakoutP +1

  • Don’t schedule plenary talks immediately after breakout sessions. Not all breakout rooms will end on time and there needs to be time for everyone to switch back to the plenary session.

  • I appreciated the attempt o try many different technologies, but it became a lot to juggle. I would recommend using just one Q&A system - I would vote for all presentation Q&A on Slack and disabling chat and q&a on Zoom. +1

  • breakout brainstorming - both because breakouts were too short for any real discussion and because social science/management research has shown that brainstorming sessions are mostly ineffective. different formats are better for generating ideas.

  • Deep dive performance.

  • Keep using Slack for Q&A. Moving questions to Slack helped everyone stay on schedule, while also allowing a place for further discussion. Threads allowed multiple simultaneous conversations.

  • Slack channels with threads for posters did work surprisingly well, and helped me to network with new colleagues I would not otherwise have met. +2

  • Virtual poster session worked better than I expected. +2

  • It was a bit difficult to navigate through the Agenda. If your plan was to attend all the material on a given day, it was fine. But if you were going to attend only select parts, it was not so easy to visually scan and find stuff on the confluence agenda. +2

  • Overall organization was very good.

  • Choice of hours was good balance between time zones. Two 30 minute lunch breaks was a good choice, as that is enough time to grab food. +1

  • In breakouts, the presentations ended up taking most of the time. One idea for breakouts is to reduce the length to 30 minutes but have a more specific but interdisciplinary discussion topic. +2

Action items