SubOptic 2007 – How was it for you? By John Horne At the end of our conference in Baltimore, I promised a number of people that I would let them know the feedback we got from attendees, about their perception of our event. This article fulfils that promise.
in determining their length of stay. This we will reconsider for our next conference, although there are commercial advantages in going for a bundled approach, which can help lower the registration fee.
Despite the unfortunate delay in sending out our Review Questionnaire, we received comments from well over 100 respondents, representing over 15% of the total attendees. With this sample size, taken together with anecdotal evidence from Executive and Program Committee members who attended, we feel that the comments we received are representative of the general view of attendees.
Networking is only part of the story however and we pride ourselves on the quality of the overall program we offer and its ability to encourage attendance. The overall response we obtained was that the program structure and content was again rated highly.
So what was the feedback! Generally it was very favourable with regard to location, venue and the overall program structure, including length and number of parallel sessions. We are especially pleased that the choice of Baltimore and the use of a hotel style venue scored very highly, vindicating our decision to go for a more down to earth, less costly location and venue after Monaco. Indeed over 80% of respondents thought that in terms of value for money, Baltimore scored well. This is an appreciable improvement over the past two conferences. The hotel style venue also brought together all the attendees in one location and helped encourage the Networking – Networking, which is part of the value of attending SubOptic. There were some reservations however about the bundling of hotel and registration. Some attendees would have preferred to make their own hotel arrangements and have more flexibility
In general attendees liked the concept of having a Keynote Speaker at the beginning of each day. Some however questioned the choice of speakers and in particular the late substitution of one of them. We will need to reflect upon this and the balance of speakers from within and outside our immediate industry for next time.
comments about whether the balance of technical versus commercial content was correct. With the process we currently use it is difficult to determine the oral presentation program until we receive the abstracts in response to our “Call for Papers”. We then have to provide a balanced programme using the material that is supplied. This is a strength, as it allows anyone in our community to send in an abstract, and if of sufficient quality get it accepted, but a weakness in trying to deliver a balanced, quality oral program. Next time we will try to define more clearly in the “Call for Papers” the topic areas and subjects we are looking for and perhaps top this up with more invited papers in areas, which are clearly under subscribed, but are very topical.
The Roundtables were rated as good but perhaps a little disappointing. Respondents noted insufficient opportunity to engage with the audience and stimulate a real debate, rather than go over old ground. Roundtables are difficult to organise, panellists change at the last minute, and to be successful they require a real spark between the moderator, panellists and the audience, which is difficult to pre-plan. This is an area I think we will need to give some innovative thought to, next time.
The Poster Program as we had hoped proved to be one of the highlights of the show, demonstrating once again that selection to present a poster is not second best to an oral presentation. The posters acted as a catalyst to get attendees together and perhaps because there were no other program distractions and also influenced by the cocktail bar that was available, stay and discuss their content and matters impacting upon our community. The posters proved to be of such interest that we were asked to consider making them available for a longer period and providing a larger space to display them in.
The oral sessions, which form the bulk of the program, again whilst being highly rated drew a number of comments. Some people found them rather disappointing, with little new technical content, whilst others found them truly eye opening. We also had
Another highlight of the conference was the tutorial program and with standing room only in a number of them, we will obviously need to reconsider the logistics next time. Also our attempt to broaden the range of subject matter appears to have been 36