Birds of a feather
Ever wish you could just find the people at a conference with knowledge or interest on a particular GIS topic that is on your mind and have an open conversation? That can be difficult if none of the predetermined presentations at a conference cover that specific topic and/or you don’t know who has experience or interest. This is where the “Birds of a Feather” sessions come in. These are not lectures, workshops, or prepared presentations. These are smaller group discussion sessions focused on a GIS topic proposed by attendees.
How this works:
Topic Selection: A few weeks before the conference, registered attendees will get access to a submission form to suggest topics of interest. While you can submit anything related to the GIS industry, we encourage you get a specific as you can with your responses.
Example Responses for the ask: “Identify a topic or issue you would like to discuss with your peers."
Answer: “Mobile”
That is a pretty broad topic. Getting a little more specific could help provide more context for the discussion.
Answer: “Working with mobile offline”
This answer gets more to the point of your interests and can save time getting the discussion going.
Session Scheduling: The conference planning team will review responses and look for common topics that have enough interest to warrant a group discussion. Not every topic submitted may make the cut. If there is a very popular topic, we may need to create multiple groups. The intent is to keep discussion groups to a max of 10-12 and a min of 4-5.
NWGIS will post the scheduled discussion topics to the NWGIS website and alert attendees via email. The Birds of a Feather sessions will be around 30 minutes each. There could be 8-10 discussion groups at the same time. We will have 2-3 rounds of discussions. The number of sessions we end up with depend entirely on what topics you submit.
Facilitation: On the day, we will go over the rules of road for the discussions and direct where sessions will meet. There will not be a formal facilitator, but someone in the group will need to volunteer to help steer the discussion. This lead does not have to be a subject matter expert, just be willing to help make sure the conversation stays reasonably focused and that everyone has an opportunity to contribute.
The goal is open discussion and networking. Share your ideas and experiences. If you submitted a specific topic of concern, bring that up.