Tailoring My Conference Experience

There are probably good reasons for organizing conferences (congresses, conventions) with only a small portion of the experience allotted to plenary sessions, and much to sessions in "tracks". Among them come to mind offering the possibility to present (and get feedback) to many more participants, and in effect organizing mini-conferences for specialists in the tracks which might well not be viable as independent conferences (economies of scale, low marginal cost of time devoted to tracks).

The down side for attendees who are not specialists (or sufficiently knowledgeable to be truly interested in some very technical topics) is that they will spend a non-negligeable amount of time in session which they may barely understand, and about which they are certainly unlikely to provide good criticism, feedback, and suggestions. What is more, they have to choose among the tracks the one with which they have the most affinity.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of this sort that I've faced was ISMP 2003. The parallel sessions, which occupied about 60% of the in-session time, required ten selections (one per session) among about twenty-five options each! The number of tracks is indicative of how specialized they were, by the way: academic Balkanization at work.

Session nature	Number	Total Hours	Options	Sequences
Plenary	6	6:45	includes opening, announcement of prize-winners	1
Semi-plenary	4	4:00	3	81
Parallel	10	15:00	up to 26	1025
Breaks (coffee, lunch)	15	9:45

One solution, often used by organizers of trade shows with "workshops" or "tutorials" (at extra cost) is to schedule the sessions with restricted attendance before (or after) the main conference, rather than interleaved. However, conferences such as ISMP are designed for five-legged sheep. If too little of the conference is interesting, one can choose not to attend, right?

In an ideal world, the program (schedule) for multi-track conferences would not be decided by the organizers, but by the attendees. I would imagine a system allowing registered attendees to vote for the titles they would like to hear, then the schedule would be calculated to enable the conference to provide the greatest total interest, avoiding (as much as possible) scheduling at the same time two or more sessions appealing to the same attendees, and concomitantly avoiding "deserts" without something for everyone.

In the absence of such a system, I've begun considering my options for ROADEF 2006.

Session nature	Number	Total Hours	Options	Complexification
Plenary	4	4:30	includes annual meeting of the association	x1
Semi-plenary	0	0:00
Parallel	10	15:15 (77%)	7	x 282,475,249
Breaks (coffee, lunch)	9	9:00	plus pôt d'accueil, gala dinner

I could print out the fifteen pages (actually, I ought to be able to edit it to ten pages, one per session, with the seven tracks on one page, but it annoys me to have to do the word processing myself) and then eliminate until I have my program. But what I prefer to do is add some JavaScript to the schedule page allowing me to click to hide sessions I want to "eliminate" and then print just the final filtered list.

The JavaScript to do this is explained on the Microsoft site, and there are also examples on "real live" sites, like lemonde.fr (who use it to allow readers to hide boxes of figures or other complementary info). In a nutshell,

1. Enclose the text to hide or show in a div or span with a unique id attribute
2. Define a function (called "toggle(e)", for instance), which either swaps the visibility property between visible and hidden, or swaps the style display property between "none" and ""
3. Add an identified way to invoke the function, as the "onclick" property of a visible element, or an anchor (link) with "href=javascript:toggle(joe)"

In practice, this took me a lot longer to achieve than I expected. Fortunately, I found the lemonde code to use to debug my code (it worked, mine looked similar but simpler, why didn't mine work?). Apparently I don't do JavaScript nearly often enough; it took me much too long to recognize my problem case-sensitivity-- the difference between "GetElementByID" (wrong) and "GetElementById" (right)!!

My function:

<script language="javascript">
function toggle(e){
id_cible=e;
cible = document.getElementById(id_cible);
if (cible.style.display=="none"){
cible.style.display="";
} else {
cible.style.display = "none";
}
}
</script>

An example of a block it hides/shows (showing the title in any case):
<p class="headbox2">
<a class="pnav" href="javascript:toggle('LuS2P1')"> Salle 2 – Bioinformatique I – Rumen Andonov</a>
<a name="LuS2S1"></a></p>

The toggle call has been set up in the session title; now to wrap the content block...it seems necessary to set at least one property of the object, by the way, or else the script cannot test the display property (object has no properties error).
<div id="LuS2P1" style="visibility: visible;">
<p>* Identification de nouvelles protéines et de variants de protéines connues par méthode évolutionnaire, Jean-Charles Boisson, Laetitia Jourdan, El-Ghazali Talbi et Christian Rolando
* Suffix Tree ANalyser (STAN): Un outil de recherche de motifs nucléiques et peptidiques dans les chromosomes, Anne-Sophie Valin, Grégory Ranchy, Yoann Mescam, Patrick Durand, Sébastien Tempel, Jacques Nicolas

</p></div>