The three academic sessions of this conference will not attempt to duplicate the (dreary) experience of traditional academic conventions, where high-status individuals read aloud long papers, while the low-status masses in the audience sit like victims rather than engaging in a more equal debate.  Rather, we will exploit the advantages of text-based chat - and avoid dealing with the challenges of voice chat which works poorly beyond perhaps five participants.

The chair of each session will prepare a list of ten questions, to be posted ahead of time on this wiki.  The panelists for the given session will prepare their own very brief answers to these questions, perhaps as short as a single sentence.  The chair will begin the session by using the prepared questions in interview format, asking them of specific panelists.  For example, in the first session, the chair could have questions asking specific researchers about their different projects.  As appropriate, given the question "in question," any participant can contribute answers or other responses, typing them into the chat.

If you are preparing questions or brief answers, you could keep them in a text file (such as with Notepad) and paste that one at a time into the chat.  This might be especially good for literature citations, but if you send them to us ahead of time we can post them on this wiki.  Most of the text conversation should be spontaneous and creative.

Session chairs, panelists, and others who want to be very well prepared should check out our page on Chat Macros. 

WoW chat automatically lists the character speaking, so it would be easy for participants to scroll up and down the chat window comparing responses from different people, and different ideas.  Thus, we will have a rich collective conversation, rather than bedlam.  Any participant may activate the chatlog feature (on the command line or chat line enter "/chatlog" and hit ENTER), and thus have a permanent record of exactly what was said.  This will be used, judiciously, to create a collective publication of a scholarly nature. 

We suggest you use the chat interface to disable other chat channels.  We plan to use the guild chat, limiting the conversation to Science members, so make sure that one is turned on.  For the activities to follow the academic session, we may also recruit people to a raid group at the time of the meeting.  Raid groups have a limit of 40 persons, but the guild can be much larger.

Warning: There is some possibility that all the activity on the server will cause it to bump people off.  We have experienced this, although it is not common.  Simply log back in and give the command to log the chat again.  If the server is very full, you may need to wait in line, but please be patient.  In case of any serious difficulties, we will update the home page of the wiki in real time with information.