Thanks so much for volunteering to moderate one or more sessions at NISO Plus 2021!
This page contains information about your responsibilities as a moderator — we’ll keep it updated with more information, including answers to questions we get from you between now and the conference.
Week of January 11
- Arrange a planning meeting or offline discussion about the session as soon as possible with your speakers, to ensure that everyone is clear about the topic, timing, running order, etc. As you know, one of the main goals of NISO Plus is to facilitate discussions and conversations among attendees in order to help us all better understand and address the information community’s current and future needs and opportunities. This will help NISO — and the wider community — to prioritize our goals and activities for the coming months and years. So please do keep this in mind as you meet with speakers to plan your session(s), as well as during the event itself.
- There are anything from two to eight speakers in a session, with a maximum of 45 minutes for the presentation element — where there are fewer speakers, we recommend aiming for around 30 minutes for this
- Presentations don’t need to be formal — a panel discussion or conversation with few or no slides is also fine, and may be a good way to manage the larger groups and/or for sessions where two or three people are bringing very different perspectives to a topic
- Where several topics have been grouped together into a single session, please work with your speakers to determine how best to string them together (this is where your moderating skills will be very valuable!)
- Please be sure to review the current session description during or after the planning session, and update it as needed
- To help kick off the discussion sessions after the presentation, please end the pre-recorded presentations with some questions and/or other instructions/prompts for attendees
- Liaise with your speakers to agree on a time slot/s ASAP for the pre-recorded part of the session, and make reservation/s in this central calendar (http://bit.ly/NP21Video). This does require a Google login, but only one person need enter the recording time for a given session, so hopefully this won’t be burdensome
- If no time works for everyone in the session (for example. because of time zone issues), you may book more than one recording slot…but please be judicious
- All sessions must be recorded before the end of January
By end of January
- Join the NISO Plus community in Discourse — this is where we will be encouraging discussion before, during, and after the conference, so please join us there as soon as possible! We will be adding all speakers to our Discourse instance this week
- Attend the recording session/s (or, if this is impossible due to time zones, watch the recording before the conference). Act as moderator during the recording, including introducing and thanking the speakers, time-keeping, and providing information about the discussion part of the session
- A NISO staff member will organize the actual recording, including sending invitations to you and the speakers, setting up the Zoom meeting, and helping with time-keeping
February 22-25
- Attend the live session during NISO Plus 2021 — both the viewing of the pre-recorded presentations and the discussion afterwards.
- Sched is the “home” for conference links and information, and all sessions will have links to the pre-recorded presentations and then links to the Zoom discussions for the session. Please encourage your speakers to upload their slides to your session before the conference
- We anticipate that most, if not all, discussions will happen in Zoom breakout rooms, with one or more speakers or NISO staff in each room to help facilitate
- As mentioned above, please be sure to include “instructions” for the breakout groups in the pre-recorded part of the session, to get the conversations started. This could be one or more questions for them to consider, a problem to solve, use cases to discuss, etc (we are happy to help advise as needed)
- All attendees will be invited to join the NISO Discourse community before the conference, and a separate channel will be set up for each session, to facilitate ongoing conversations
- Please be sure to wrap up the discussion part of the session promptly, as we want to ensure that the conference runs on schedule, including allowing a 15-minute break between each session (NISO staff will help with this as needed)
March-April
- Work with NISO staff after the session to summarize outcomes eg action points, learning points, etc
- Any chat during the live screening will be captured, and discussions in Zoom will be recorded
- We’ll also capture any discussions that happen in the Discourse platform
- We will provide you with a template document for sharing your own comments and feedback on the session, and encourage you to ask the speakers to contribute to this as well
We hope this answers your questions, but please don’t hesitate to contact us if there’s anything else you need help with.
Thank you again for your support of NISO Plus 2021 — we quite literally couldn’t do it without you!