The morning talks

The moderation of the event went quite smoothly. Only the internet connection sometimes caused a delay with spotlighting and people realising it was their turn to speak. In the morning we had 27 attendees. The 3 morning speakers we had scheduled for 20 minutes each all spoke for over 40 minutes. This was quite a relief as we had initially wanted to get 4 speakers and were glad that the 3 speakers filled the time well. The only disadvantage was that by the time they had finished it was technically already the lunch break so we had to do a very quick Q&A and the networking had to happen during the lunch break. That was probably also the reason why only a few people attended the networking. We made sure that there was nevertheless a conversation flowing in the breakout rooms by each of our team joining one of the speakers and making conversation.

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The afternoon talks

In the afternoon we had 18 attendees. We had hoped that our 2 afternoon speakers would talk as long as the morning speakers but they only talked for 20 minutes each. Therefore, we tried to fill the rest of the time with a Q&A. Initially, the plan was that Tom moderated the Q&A, but to make the Q&A more of a discussion, all 4 members of my team decided to join the Q&A and ask questions. This did prove to be more interesting. After about 40 minutes we got to a point where we did not feel like we could stretch the discussion for any longer without losing more attendees. Therefore, we texted the competition group and they agreed to do the award ceremony earlier. After that we took over again and directed people to the networking groups. Unfortunately, we only had 2 people attending that. We assume that after nearly 2 day of online conferences people were quite tired. That was most likely also the reason why we had less attendees in the afternoon.

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