2016-06-07 ACME All-hands Meeting Retrospective

Owned by Renata McCoy
Last updated: Jul 13, 2016 by Milena Veneziani
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Retrospective

This is a retrospective of the 2016 ACME All-hands Meeting with the aim to identify improvements for the next ACME meeting. Please note what you liked and did not like about the meeting, what you would like to see improved, where did you feel like there was not enough time or if there was too much time spend on something, or maybe something did not get covered that you would like to see added to the next meeting.

This “All-Hands” meeting's purpose was to inform of the plans and give overview of the status of work across the whole ACME team, to highlight the science and computational achievements and connect with the current and prospective collaborators, to connect groups together and improve planning for next year and ACME v2, and identify any inconsistencies in planning between groups in preparation for the upcoming July production runs. Please let us know if you found it useful and fulfilling its purpose. Did you think the hackathon was a good idea, and if you participated in it, did you find it useful and would like to see it offered again?


If you are agreeing with the statement already made, just add '+1' at the end of a statement, so we have an approximate count on how many votes are for a particular item. 

What did we do well?

  • Including outside collabs. Having them in the mix with talks and interactions will help get the word out about what we are doing. +5
  • uniform appreciation for the science talks +1
  • Breakouts and speed dating were very useful +3
  • At the first all-hands there was a lot of reporting back from the breakout sessions to the plenary.  That did not happen this time, and I thought the meeting went well without it.+1

What should we have done better?

  • suggestion was made to me that we might start the first day at 10AM (or noon), gradually shifting to earlier start, to ease transition for west coast participants. +4
  • talks that were pushed into the group meetings or speed dating sessions took up too much time that should have been used for other things - keep the presentations in their own sessions or into posters +2
  • The plenary talks should have been in parallel sessions, as they typically were only interesting to a specific group.

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