
Booths – Or How to Run an ICSE Workshop Differently

Some time last year, we figured that it would be a good idea to have a workshop on software engineering and XML technologies; we proposed that as an ICSE Workshop, it was accepted and we had about 50 participants. We wanted to organize it in a novel way and avoid the conference-disguised-as-workshop phenomenon. In this brief feature, I summarize our experience. 
At an IFIP 2.9 meeting some of us had experienced a new way to organize interactive meetings and we wanted to try that at this year's ICSE. The idea is to have a sequence (three in our case) of booth sessions were a substantial number of authors present their work in parallel. Each author was given a booth (or more realistically a table) in a particular part of the room. We encouraged authors to prepare short presentations or demos explaining their work. Other participants then spend 10-15 minutes listening to the presentations of those authors they are interested in.
I visited about 15 booths and got a reasonable idea about the body of work in the area within only three hours. Particularly, younger authors who often do not contribute too actively when they attend their first workshops were forced to expose and explain their work to most participants. Something to watch out for is to brief the authors properly beforehand and also to make sure that the room is big enough so that the background noice does not get into the foreground too much. Altogether, most participants found that the format worked rather well, given that we tried it for the first time and I would recommend this peer-to-peer interaction for other occasions.
— Wolfgang Emmerich