Scheduling a Conference So People Attend the Sessions

The programme is where an accepted set of papers becomes an event. Done carelessly, it produces sessions with four attendees, speakers competing with the people who most wanted to hear them, and an audience that is exhausted by mid-afternoon.

The arithmetic first

Slot length must include everything. Talk, questions, and the transition to the next speaker. For a concrete operational comparison, Monitask explains employee attendance tracking software in practical terms.

A 90-minute session with four papers is 22 minutes each, inclusive. If you tell speakers "20 plus 5", the session overruns before anyone does anything wrong.

Transitions are two minutes each unless presentations are collected onto one machine in advance — which is worth doing for that reason alone.

Tell speakers the real number and tell the chairs to enforce it. See chairing a session.

Grouping the sessions

By topic, so the people who want one talk want the others. This sounds obvious and it competes with grouping by convenience, by author availability, or by whatever the submission system produced.

Avoid putting the two best-known speakers in parallel. They will split the audience, and both will have half a room.

Avoid parallel sessions that appeal to the same people. The point of grouping by topic is that the conflicts fall between groups rather than within them.

Where a subfield has several papers, put them together rather than spreading them for balance. The people who came for that subfield can then attend all of it.

Put related sessions in sequence, in the same room, so an audience does not have to move.

The slots that need thinking about

The first session of the first day. People arrive late, travel goes wrong, registration takes longer than planned. Do not put something essential here.

Immediately after lunch. The hardest slot to hold an audience. Some organisers put the most engaging speaker here deliberately.

The last session of the last day. Attendance drops sharply as people leave for flights. Either accept it and schedule accordingly, or end earlier and schedule nothing there. Putting a good paper in the final slot punishes the speaker for something they did not control.

Immediately after the keynote. Frequently well attended, because people are already in the building and in the mood.

Breaks

Longer than feels efficient. The breaks are where the conversations happen, and the conversations are why people came.

Twenty minutes minimum for coffee, and it needs to be twenty minutes of break rather than twenty minutes that includes walking to another building and queueing.

A real lunch break, not forty minutes.

And do not schedule anything against the breaks. A parallel session at lunchtime is attended by nobody and it removes the break for its speakers.

Practical constraints to collect early

Speakers who cannot attend on particular days. Ask when you send acceptances, not afterwards.

Religious observance, which affects both days and times.

Travel constraints for people coming a long way.

Room capacities and equipment. A session expected to draw a crowd should not be in the small room, and this is worth predicting from the submissions.

Accessibility of the rooms, and the distance between them. A ten-minute walk between parallel sessions means nobody switches. See accessibility.

Publishing it

Early. People are applying for funding and booking travel, and both need a programme.

Complete, with times and rooms. A programme without room allocations is not usable for planning.

In a form that works on a phone, since that is what people will use on the day.

With changes marked. If the programme changes after publication, say what changed rather than silently replacing it.

What goes wrong

Sessions overrun because the arithmetic was wrong, and the effect compounds across the day.

Two sessions everyone wants, in parallel.

The last slot on the last day, given to someone who deserved better.

Nobody told the chairs they were chairing.

Rooms too small for the sessions that drew crowds.

No slack anywhere, so a single overrun cascades.

Build in slack. A ten-minute buffer before lunch and before the end of the day absorbs the ordinary drift and prevents it accumulating.

The short version

Do the arithmetic including questions and transitions, and tell speakers the real number.

Group by topic, so conflicts fall between sessions rather than within them, and do not put the two best-known speakers in parallel.

Long breaks. They are where the conference actually happens.

Think about the first slot, the post-lunch slot and the last slot, all of which are structurally disadvantaged.

Publish early and complete — people are booking travel around it.

For an independent authoritative reference, consult ACM conference resources for professional guidance on academic events.