DIP 14 - Using Posters as a medium alongside Talks

Hi y’all!

On scientific conferences, oftentimes there are far more submissions for talks + topics than there are slots for people to speak. I experienced the same with DevCon.
To mitigate this issue, a common solution is issuing people a poster presentation and marking off some special area where all the posters can be presented.

In my current research of how the world of scientific in-person conferences works in general and reacted to Covid and digital conferences in specific, this is something that comes up a lot and that I have not yet seen in the Ethereum space.

Apparently, poster presentations are a thing if you have an idea / worked on something interesting but weren’t approved as a speaker. Some conferences even give the possibility to vote for the different posters, allowing to give awards for the best poster presentation. Maybe that could be something that POAP could implement as well, but that’s just a tangent thought.

From what I’ve gathered so far, this format also applies well in the digital realm - when the originator of the poster is available during certain time frames to answer questions that are submitted via Email or Chat. Essentially this would also allow for people to present their work without being physically present.

In the spirit of “more voices, more thoughts”, maybe this would allow for the exhibition of more ideas and interesting projects without stealing time from the main or secondary stages.

3 Likes

Really love the idea and think we should do this. Also really nice for projects with only stage-shy team-members to get out their Idea. But in order to really evaluate this in the team it should be submitted as a DIP on github. Would you be willing to do this? Don’t hesitate to ask in case you have questions!

cc @Bettinabf as it touches programming

Interesting idea! So you’d recommend people that didn’t get the chance to have a talk / weren’t picked for a talk slot to design an informational poster with their content which will be displayed in a kind of gallery walk? I imagine there would be a limited availability for those poster slots as well and we’d need to have a selection process in place as well.

I have a couple of questions:

  • Who will chose which posters get the chance to join the poster exhibition? (e.g. the programming team?)
  • How do we ensure that the posters are not used for marketing purposes only (quality and selection process must be in place)?
  • Poster Award: Not sure, since I expect there to be an UX Award next year, too and then we’d have to juggle between a lot of awards and committees etc. We would need very dedicated organizers to take care of this.
  • Poster exhibition should be separate from the art exhibition spaces; space allocation should be still prominent though / could be done in hallways?
  • Who would print the posters and arrange them?
  • Would you be the “owner” of this topic and drive it forward or are you just dropping an idea here?
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In digital events I’ve seen the poster presentations just be 10 minute slots with the posters generally available as pdfs in the app. So technically you could do away with actual posters, and just have a stage for poster presentations on a specific day and an area in the app for people to review the different submissions perhaps.

2 Likes

I have submitted the DIP on Github.

Regarding the other questions (from the bottom up):

  • Originally, I just wanted to drop the idea. But of course I’d be willing to help! Don’t know the process of organization - but at the very least I could help on prem during the preparations of DevCon.
  • Who would print the posters and arrange them - yes. No idea :slight_smile: I guess I could do it, since I wanted to be in Bogota earlier than DevCon.
  • Could probably be done in the hallways - although at our University we got issues with fire protection regulations because hallways could be marked as escape routes and then stuff standing around could become problematic.
  • Are there any ideas on how to do the awards yet? Maybe our friends at POAP have an ace up their sleeves. @POAP Do you think you could do special tokens that can be used as awards? In my understanding, this could be an efficient and uncomplicated way to give people something special AND blockchain-y.
  • You’re right, quality needs to be addressed. Maybe through some guidelines on the poster design (without taking away too much freedom from poster design) that filters out marketing purposes?
  • I imagined that there is either a submission + selection process to invite people to submit their posters - or that those people get invited to submit posters that have been turned down for talks.
4 Likes

Cool thanks for submitting the DIP! I’ll have a look later but I think this is a great idea in general. : )

1 Like

Thanks for submitting the PR! Left some comments there.
Also dropping the link here to lower friction for readers of the forum: https://github.com/efdevcon/DIPs/pull/42