Living On The Edge events are typically assembled from the bottom up. Proposals from the community, connected by a theme, organise themselves into a coherent program. LOTE5 has its theme and title (Fail/unFail); now it is time to come up with a grid along with to arrange the talks, workshops, hackathons, parties and so on that are being proposed.
I propose:
Thursday 25th February: opening event. Plenary session: a keynote speech followed by a meet and greet session, and maybe a party.
Friday 26th and Saturday 27th February: conference. Two full days of planned sessions. We identify the rooms available, divide the day into 1-hour slots and proceed to allocate the different proposals to the different slots. Talks should probably not take up more than one slot (and that includes substantial Q&A), whereas a workshop might take up three or four consecutive slots, and a hackathon a whole day.
Sunday 28th: unconference. As above, except "freestyling" in the Edgeryders tradition; people are encourages to take advantage of each other; we will all be in the same physical space, and that does not happen often! So, people are encouraged to invent a session on the fly, claim a slot and get on with it.
As always, we will bake substantial coffee breaks into the program – that’s where the action is in any self-respecting conference.
Dividing the typical day into time slots. This implies making decisions on how long time slots are: sessions can be of varying lengths, but these lengths need to be "modular" (see below).
These two moves build a grid with rooms treated as columns and time slots treated as rows. This gives everyone a concrete sense of how much free space we still have, as well as what is happening where, when.
At this point we finalise the program, or ask people to submit more proposals.
Example of a modular day:
module = 45 minutes
9.30 -10.15: first slot
10.15 - 11.00: second slot
11.00-11.30: coffee break
11.30-12.15: third slot
12.15-13.00: fourth slot
13.00-14.30: lunch break
14.30-15.15: fifth slot
[...]
You get the idea. A long session will simply claim two or more slots in the same room.
I think the modular day division works well (although I would start at 9 - as a Belgian I feel incredibly lazy if I’m not up and running by 9).
What exactly do you want to decide urgently? The day structure? The number of rooms? This seems a bit premature to me, since we want to ask people for two more months to submit proposals. No?
If we start with getting a format, time preference and short stubs for what speakers want to talk about we’ll see we have a decent, say 30% of the agenda filled in. This also works as engagement, because it’s what helps others jump in and see how their stories fit in Lote.
What would be great to know is how many rooms will the venue have because that helps organise parallel sessions.
