Virtual Poster Session

Resource Type
Survey (Community Forum)
Author
Innovation Research Interchange
Topic
Project Management
Associated Event
Publication

Have you had a virtual poster session?

We would like to have an Innovation meeting with presenters as well as audience present in different countries. We have found that poster sessions work the best for us but limits the participation to the organizing site. I was wondering if you have experience in organizing such a poster session virtually or in some form where remote teams can present and participate in the session. I will appreciate your input. – Jyoti Seth, Strategic Program Leader, W.R. Grace

Community Responses

Director, large building materials manufacturer
Yes, we have successfully used virtual poster sessions for several years to allow sharing of technical posters globally.  We built our own internal system using Microsoft Silverlight and it worked well.  We found the best way was to have the poster presented as a power point slide show as opposed to a ‘poster’, and used a live chat room feature to allow people to ask questions/discuss the poster.  I would encourage you to take this route – while not as good as live poster sessions, it allows these sessions to be done without the travel costs.

Bill Miller – IRI Emeritus, President 4G Innovation LLC
Yes, I just had a one hour global web meeting using Adobe Connect Pro hosted in Hong Kong. Participants were from all over the globe.  There were three slide presentations and a side IM’ing conversation among all participants and host.  The conference was organized as part of the icknowledgecenter.com and specifically the community of practice in IC practitioners.  By the way, IC = intangible capital, which is a combination of knowledge management and innovation management.

Albert Johnson, IRI Emeritus, NanoMaterials Innovation Center
Some time ago, I produced “Sharing Knowledge is Power” day sponsored by IRI and conducted at Corning Incorporated’s research facility.  We did have in-person posters *but* we also had panel discussions of the poster presenters, which we shared via videoconference.

We used a videoconferencing bridging service and the participants had to pay the bridging line fees to the bridging company (they were not free but not daunting either).

I moderated the panel discussions and the bridging company provided a feed to my site showing all the participants on one screen (9 sites) and a video operator to manage the lines. We started the call a little early to make sure everything worked (the bridge we used included 1/2 hour I think “free” to do that setup and test). 

The panels started with each panelist giving a 5-10 minute synopsis of their poster with PowerPoint slides that we fed into the video stream (alternating back and forth with the camera shots of panelists and audience).  After the synopsis we took questions.  No problem getting questions going.    I took questions in turn from the teleconference lines and from the audience. Each panel was organized around some topic/theme, with short breaks between.   That way both at the head end and on the remote lines people could participate in the segment (hour or so) of keenest interest, or more, and respect their other priorities.

I have some ideas for how to get this done for you but need some more context that you may or may not want to share.  The point is this can definitely be done well, most likely via videoconference.