Chris Lamb writes ("Questions after talks at DebConf (idea)"): > I noticed yesterday [0] that the PyCascades conference [1] explicitly > does not permit any questions and answers after a presentation.
This is interesting. As an audience member I have sometimes found myself intensely irritated when (it seems to me that) a questioner is wasting everyone's time with some incomprehensible polemic, or whatever. Often when this happens I feel the speaker does not shut them down quickly enough. I think the speaker is perhaps not always sure enough of their ground to do so. I think this could be addressed by having a moderator who was prepared to make a value judgement about the question, and who had a low threshold for intervening. In general I often find that stronger moderation (of audience participation in talks and panels, and of airtime in BOFs) is a good thing. However, I would be very sad to see questions banned entirely. Some of my best experiences at DC18 were related to questions. Talks with small audiences or in small rooms often turn in a kind of BOF session which can be both very useful, and very affirming for everyone. And speaking entirely personally: When giving a talk, especially about new software or anything complicated, i find it can be very helpful to be interrupted if I have skipped over something. I'm aware of the questioner self-selection problem. I don't feel unsure, so I don't need help from a moderator in managing the questions I might get :-). Overall, perhaps we could ensure that we have a moderators available, certainly for the larger rooms, and also whenever the speaker requests it. The moderator could have a quick chat with the speaker about how much support they want, whether the speaker wants to take questions during the talk, at the end, or not at all, etc. Ideally moderators would have been exposed to some kind of training or at least briefing. The "go up to the stage afterwards" format for questions is a good one too, though. Certainly it should be offered to speakers, and sometimes even recommended. Speakers should certainly not feel that they are expected to take questions in the standard "talk to the whole room" format, if they feel intimidated by that idea. I think, the bigger the room, the more appropriate it is to use the "chat up at the stage" format. Another possibility would be for the moderator to use the per-room irc channel to collect people who want to ask questions. That is, people would state their question in irc, and the moderator would tell, again in irc, who the next person is to ask a question. So the moderator could choose the best questions. Ian.