About the young researchers forum (2)

Second post about the PODC/DISC young researchers forum. Since this was the first edition of the event, the organization started off quite slowly, and ended up being very rushed! In this post, I’ll give the timeline of the organization.

• Fall 2024: I shared the idea on the zulip chat of the community, and got a few positive comments. In particular Billy K. Moses Jr said he would be happy to help organizing this.

• March/April: We asked on zulip if people had preferred dates and format, and whether they’d interested in giving talks. The response was limited, so we reached out directly to around 20 students and postdocs (or tagged them on Zulip), which was much more effective.

• Early May: We realized that there were very few dates that worked well for both Billy and me. We eventually settled on Friday, June 13.

• Mid-May: We sent an announcement to the PODC mailing list, inviting junior researchers to submit talk proposals and senior researchers to contribute keynote suggestions or volunteer to host junior-senior sessions (more on that in a later post). We also asked everyone to provide their availability, which turned out to be crucial given the wide range of time zones.

• Early June: We created the website, shared the registration form via the PODC mailing list, and began drafting a tentative schedule.

• Two days before the event: We finalized the schedule, thoroughly tested our Zoom setup, and sent multiple emails to participants with all the necessary information.

In the end, everything went smoothly—but it would definitely have been less stressful if we had started planning earlier!