TPRC54 Best Practices for Moderators
TPRC is a dynamic research venue that creates energetic and memorable dialog between presenters and attendees. These recommendations aim to provide paper presenters and session discussions the information you will need to fulfill these important roles for the conference.
The agenda for TPRC54 features 95-minute paper sessions that run in five concurrent tracks over the course of two days. Most paper sessions have three scheduled papers; exceptions include sessions with lightning talks and those in which there was an untimely withdrawal of the paper. Maintaining the order and timing is of utmost importance as registrants will often “session hop” which requires the paper being presented exactly as scheduled on the program.
Each paper is allocated 20 minutes for author presentation and 10 minutes of audience questions. Questions must follow each paper individually, rather than at the end of the session.
Session Moderators
As a session moderator, your primary responsibilities are to keep paper presentations on schedule, facilitate Q&A with attendees, and pose a question or comment to each paper. To accomplish this, you will need to do the following:
Please start the paper session on time. The schedule is tight, and the only way to ensure presenters have their full amount of time is to start the session in a timely manner. Inevitably this means that the first minute of your opening remarks may have to compete with interruptions from audience conversation, but ultimately starting the session at the appropriate time is necessary to ensure a timely introduction for your session, so persevere in gently, but firmly, getting the room to settle down for the session!
Please keep paper introductions to a brief reference to the author’s name, past affiliations, and the title of the paper.
If a scheduled paper drops out, please start the other papers at their scheduled times; do not move presentations up to fill the gap.
Dialogue with the audience is at the heart of TPRC, and presenters should be encouraged to not go over their 20 minutes with the justification that they are using their own Q&A time: that ten minutes belongs to the audience! Please take questions concerning a paper directly after that paper presentation. The audience tends to shift during a session and those who wish to ask questions related to the first paper may not be willing to stay until the end.
Sometimes some audience members may launch into long questions or soliloquies that take away from the paper presentations. As moderator, it is important to keep the discussion focused on the paper presented, not other topics introduced by the audience.
Finally, as a closing for each paper in the session, make sure that you give the paper presenter a chance to provide any closing remarks on their work, particularly if there has been a significant amount of back and forth on the topic in the Q&A. An important role as the moderator is to ensure there is always respect always shown for the paper presenter and audience members during the debate.