Thursday Afternoon Main Session

Good Afternoon/Good Morning;

Am in the main session. It started late, and now there's a lot of speakers that have very interesting and important information to share - and they're being cut-off.

Two gentlemen made very good points -

There was NOT enough time to make informal connections with other people - the way that workshops were scheduled, you attend one, run to the next one (as is everyone else), so you don't actually have time to meet people and make connections or have discussions.

Also, the main sessions were always in direct competition with workshops - how do you choose? I've been attending main sessions at the expense of some workshops that I wanted to attend. However, the "Reporting Back" component of the main sessions was somewhat helpful - you then had the opportunity to hear about what happened in the workshops - be it a very brief summary.

However - what I'm seeing now is a real time issue. Speakers are being "encouraged" to be brief, or are being cut-off - I know we can access this stuff online, but it loses it's immediacy, and somewhat, it's respect. It is somewhat disrespectful and/or dismissive to constrain the time that people have to speak to what is important to them, to to constrain them from sharing the information sharing and/or developments that occurred in their particular workshop.

Oh well. That's ok. I guess I'll just have to access the reports and such online later.