I have organised, presented at and attended more conferences than is probably good for me. I have always been in favour of multi-track events with many sessions at the same time. My experience at the last two conferences I attended, both of which had over 15 simultaneous sessions, has changed my mind.
In the past I thought it was beneficial to offer a large choice of sessions to ensure that there was always something of interest available to all attendees. That was wrong. A conference is not about the sessions that are of interest to you. It should be about the sessions that are beneficial to you.
Thanks to computer software and the web it is now easier than ever to create a survey. The technical side is so easy that people forget that there is more to it than just adding some questions to a form.
I was fortunate to attend a lecture by Marguerrite Cox, a biostatistician from Duke Clinical Research Institute in the USA, and I thought it might be useful to share her 10 Commandments.
(I have changed the examples to be more relevant to a tech audience)
