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Scheduling considerations
We document here some session scheduling considerations.
Traditionally we’ve organized TPAC breakouts on Wednesday because many Working Groups (and now IGs and CGs, too) organized two full-day meetings. We saw an opportunity to make the week more interesting for travelers by adding a third day of discussions (sometimes plenary, sometimes breakouts). Scheduling breakouts on Wednesday meant that both “early” and “late” week attendees could participate. This also meant that we might have the most TPAC attendees on Wednesday.
- Organize breakout sessions so that all TPAC attendees can attend.
- Take into account scheduling constraints expressed by session proposers. Where we cannot fully satisfy these, we work with session proposers to minimize inconvenience.
Note: In scheduling, we take into account additional factors that don't rise to high level goals.
Our main constraint is the number of in-person attendees (for example over 500 for TPAC 2024). With our goal of organizing sessions so that all TPAC attendees can attend, we need to find enough rooms during a given time slot to accommodate them.
Large rooms can hold more people and reduce the number of parallel sessions. But in practice, if a room is too large or too crowded, the experience degrades due to acoustics and other factors. This is also the case for the group meetings held the other days of the week, but for breakouts there are fewer opportunities to address problems when time is limited to 1 hour and, by design, interactions are less structured.
We seek to have no more than around 35 people in a breakout session. For 500 attendees, that means about 15 rooms in a given time slot.
Almost all session proposers want 60-minutes slots. In 2023 we offered the option of 30-minute time slots, and of the 69 proposed sessions, only a couple chose a 30-minute slot. So we did not offer 30-minute slots in 2024.
Six 60-minutes slots is about the most we can fit into a day taking into account breaks, lunch, and human stamina.
Through feedback we have heard concerns expressed about the number of parallel sessions in a given time slot. We assume these concerns are about conflicts more than number of sessions (as in "I am conflicted because I want to attend or need to attend other sessions."). However, since we are unlikely to satisfy the scheduling preferences of all TPAC attendees, we use the number of sessions in parallel as a proxy.
Below are some ideas for reducing the number of sessions in parallel.
After TPAC 2023 (nearly 70 breakout sessions, 12 per slot) we heard clear demand both for more breakout sessions and fewer overlaps and so we organized a non-TPAC remote breakouts event in March 2024. Time zones create their own challenges, but we heard positive feedback and see this approach as a good way to satisfy the demand.
Although it remains our goal to enable all TPAC attendees to attend breakout sessions, in practice not all do, as we learned by examining data collected by staff from TPAC 2024. The data suggest that about 2/3 of TPAC attendees actually joined sessions in person. Thus, we expect to be able to reduce the number of sessions in parallel by about 1/3.
However, if we cut the number of sessions on Wednesday (e.g., from 90 to 60) we may wish to add sessions to other days. That would likely mean taking time away from group meetings if we want to stick to the principle of enabling all attendees to participate in breakout sessions.
To date we have preferred to accommodate all session proposals (as long as resources permit). We have managed sessions proposals with a light touch and worked with the proposers to help them achieve their goals.
We could instead prioritize the attendee experience by declining some sessions in order to limit the number of sessions in parallel. This could address some of the attendee feedback, but:
- Attendee feedback suggests they want more breakouts, not fewer (though we recognize it is "more breakouts with fewer conflicts").
- Fewer sessions might reduce the richness of the day's agenda.
- We will still need to accommodate a large number of attendees, but in fewer rooms.
- We remain reluctant to add more formal process to breakouts day (e.g., a voting system to approve sessions).
- We could limit the number of session proposals per person. This might impact session diversity more than the number of sessions.
- We could limit the number of sessions per Member.
- Combine sessions. We do look for opportunities to combine similar proposals. However, more often than not proposers prefer to keep their sessions separate.
- Prioritize popular sessions. We ask TPAC attendees to express support for proposed breakout sessions (through thumbs-up/thumbs-down). We can do more with this information (or experiment), for example, by not scheduling very popular sessions at the same time, or by using this information when considering how to combine or limit sessions.
- Breakouts are not for group meetings. We ask that session proposers not use breakout slots for internal group (WG, CG, IG, BG) discussions. Breakouts are meant for discussion within the broader TPAC community. It makes sense to have a breakout session on a CG Specification that is gaining traction to socialize it with the broader community. We ask that people not organize a session for what amounts to an internal CG meeting on their work. We can do more to encourage and work with session proposers to keep certain topics on group agendas rather than as breakout sessions.
- Review by staff. We anticipate seeking additional review by the W3C staff to detect spammy proposals, opportunities to move discussions to appropriate group meetings at other times during the week, and opportunities to combine sessions.