Follow up To Do List and Lessons Learned

Life and Literature De-briefing and Lessons Learned

• Main points
  • Better communication all around
  • Better scheduling of time
  • Clearer assignments of duties all around
  • Packed a lot into and around the actual conference (gBHL, Staff F2F, and JRS meeting)
• To Do:
  • Refactor Life and Literature site to transition it to a post-conference communication tool
  • Plan for post-conference publication (whatever form that will take)
  • Promote the conference evaluation survey and close the survey (November 30)
  • Get the pictures from Paul Skeehan, student photographer, integrated into the BHL group in Flickr. We need to put the pictures up with a different licensing on Flickr to make them less restricted
• Do Better:
  • Plan for recording or other documentation of the meeting
    • - lipscombb Nov 23, 2011 I didn't think TitanPad was successful. Only those assigned to take notes in the TitanPad actually did so there was no real collaboration/discussion achieved. We could have just as easily taken notes on the internal wiki or directly on the L&L blog. I did have a fun chat with David Remsen during the first plenary via TitanPad (my first intro to David) anyway.
    • Others agreed with Bianca's comment; need to have a clearer idea of what we wanted to capture and find the appropriate tool
  • Wifi was very problematic
  • Make any plans for recording/video/streaming of the meeting/talks much earlier in the process
  • A/V control (the lights, audio, etc.) in the Simpson Theatre fell through a bit (thanks to Beth for filling in) caused a problem with some of the speakers in terms of lighting and sound (i.e. Rich Pyle's talk) [Audrey said the Field had another exhibition emergency that pulled the regular a/v staff off of the meeting]
  • Make clear to organizers the types of activities that would occur in a breakout room so that the proper supplies and setups for those rooms are in place
  • More explicit instructions about the panel format--these were supposed to be very brief presentations with lots of time for discussion among panelists and audience. Instead, presentations were long and discussion brief.- ConnieR Nov 28, 2011
  • Early bird registration to help get an earlier idea of attendance
  • Better coordination of the poster session with participants
  • Clearer assignments of duties to Planning Committee members
  • Better pre-planning of the flow of the meeting (who's on stage when)
  • Have a program at the conference with clear schedule and bios of speakers (Not everyone was tied to a laptop, and anyway, connectivity was a problem.NEG)
• Did Well:
  • Communications team work on social media before and during conference
  • Food (Yes, yes, yes! NEG)
  • Set up for breakfast, lunch and breaks
  • Schwag (or is it "swag"? NEG)
  • Found marvelous speakers and pretty much stayed on time (NEG)
  • Flip camera IVs were a success, see our YouTube account: http://www.youtube.com/user/BioHeritageLibrary
  • - lipscombb Nov 23, 2011 I thought the structure for the outcome of the various breakout sessions was useful