SCB: Need for speed
This year the SCB tried out a new presentation format, modeled off speed dating. In the first half of the session, each presenter got 3 minutes to present their work, and in the second half, everyone milled around chatting with those presenters whose work intrigued them.
Personally, I felt that it was a brilliant format. Three minutes really is enough to convey the bottom line, everyone got their questions in, and lots of real back and forth dialogue seemed to be going on. Certainly, business cards and so forth were flying about, and the noise level of the room was a happy din.
One particularly odd moment came when Guillermo Andres Ospina, rather than trying to cram everything about his project into three minutes in a second language, simply presented all the slides from his full-length talk on "Biodiversity conservation under armed conflict in Colombia" quickly, in silence, one after another. I must say, it felt very futuristic, as if we were all absorbing all the words and images flashing on the screen with wiser, more powerful brains.
The speed presentation idea was cooked up by four people, including bow-tied conservation gadfly Kent Redford, who told me the idea owed its birth to the concept of the remote control. One other co-inventor, Nick Salafsky, introduced his talk by explaining that the three minute time limit appealed to him because he felt his topic was so dull. Actually, I thought his topic was pretty interesting, and I just might write my next post on it.
Comments
SCB tried the speed presentations as an experiment. I personally found it very satisfying both as a presenter and as an audience member. The only downside is that I found subsequent "full length" presentations that I attended to be way too slow moving!!
We had both presenters and audience members fill out a survey of their impressions about the speed format - if other folks are interested in trying this format, we can send you the results of the survey when they become available.
Posted by: Nick Salafsky | June 30, 2006 04:02 AM
High-speed serial plenary presentations are much better than innumerable tiny longwinded parallel sessions.
At the World Ecotourism Summit in 2002 there was a time cut-off on the microphones after 7 minutes and a visible time counter in seconds.
Once your time was up, nobody could hear you, no matter if you were a Prime Minister or a mere researcher. Worked a treat!
Posted by: Ralf Buckley | August 28, 2006 09:33 AM