Evaluating the symposium design

[christoph (Christoph Haug)]

@Christoph

30 minutes: Mapping the field

Goal: To visualize the diversity of approaches to meetings represented in the room in order to make people aware of it and give them a sense of being a legitimate part of the emerging meeting science community.
Method/Tool: The facilitator presents a coordinate system that he has previously used to map different approaches to meetings (meetings-in-context vs meetings-as-context and meetings-in-focus vs meetings-out-of-focus). Then the floor is open for anyone to briefly describe in what way they are interested in meetings (or how would characterize what other meeting researchers do). The facilitator takes notes on the whiteboard using the coordinate system for orientation.

85 minutes: Identify guiding questions for the symposium

I spontaneously changed my approach just before the session and decided not to present my coordinate system at the beginning. I don’t know what I was thinking when I planned to do so because these kind of “primers” obviously influence and limit the subsequent discussion. Maybe I was afraid that people wouldn’t know where to start if we just started from a blank slate whiteboard, but that turned out to be not problem at all. You can see the result here:

Mapping the field of meeting science

One of the first exercises we did at the Gothenburg Meeting Science Symposium was to try and get an idea of the diverse interests in and approaches to meetings. People proposed various aspects and I (as the facilitator) jotted them down on the whiteboard. I can’t say that I did apparticularly good job in clustering things in any systematic way, and these kinds of collectively and incrementally produced drawings are even more difficult to make sense of for outsiders,but, for what it’s worth, here it is: [image]

It is far from any systematic overview or even a mind-map, but I think it served the purpose of having everyone in the room somehow represented as a legitimate member of the emerging community of meeting researchers. So I’m pretty happy with that part of the session.

Still, I wonder whether we should perhaps have spent more time going into more detail of what these various labels mean and how they relate to each other. Indeed, I think we could have used this map to ferret out some tensions and questions that we want to keep in mind for further discussion during the symposium. What do you think?