HINTS FOR THE SESSION CHAIR
This note is intended to provide you with guidance on managing the session for which you are responsible but inevitably you will have to show some degree of flexibility.
In essence your role will be to introduce the presenter and allocated discussants; control the length of time that they speak for and manage any questions from the floor. In most sessions three papers will be presented. Please notify the Conference Organizers immediately if you become suspicious of any possible fabrication of data or plagiarism relating to the papers in your session.
We believe that it is important to establish some ground rules that everybody understands and works towards during the conference:
• Please arrive in the room where the session is to take place at least five minutes before the appointed time. If using PowerPoint the presenters have been asked to upload their presentation on the PC before the start of the session to save time. Solicit advice at the info desk or through student assistants if experiencing trouble.
• Introduce yourself to the presenters. Ask them for biographical details to use in introducing them. Make sure that their presentation has been uploaded. Inform them of the maximum time they will have to present their paper. For example, in a one and a half hour session with three papers, each presenter should have 15 minutes and the two discussants should be allocated 12 minutes each. It is important that participants are given the chance to ask additional questions from the floor.
• For each paper introduce the author and title of the paper.
• A series of cards to help the presenter or discussants to manage the time will be available to you in each workshop room. - The first card you pass indicates that the presenter or discussant has a maximum of five minutes left. - The second card indicates that there are two minutes left. - The third and final RED card indicates that their time is over and the presenter or discussant must STOP. In issuing the red card you must be polite but firm. It is to be fair to other presenters or discussants in the session and to the audience who will wish to contribute in the discussion time.
• In managing the questions and answers part of each session please ask those asking questions to identify themselves and to keep their comments as short as possible to allow time for the presenters to respond in full. You may decide how to organize this element of the session, i.e. after each paper or after all the papers have been presented.
• Please ensure that the session finishes on time. With the number of papers to be presented this is going to be a busy event. Sessions that over run have implications for other sessions or events later in the day.
Finally, thank you for chairing and helping to make the conference as successful as we hope it will be.
