1. Guidelines for Session Chairpersons
2. Guidelines for Discussants
3. Guidelines for Presenters

1. Guidelines for Session Chairpersons

The European Academy of Management is grateful for your commitment in participating as session chairperson in the EURAM’10 Conference.

Before the conference
We suggest that you print the programme of the conference by downloading its latest version from the homepage of our website www.euram2010.org 

You will then need to prepare a short introductory comment for your session about the papers presented and to formulate a few questions.

Each session will last 1 hour and 30 minutes. Generally, 4 papers are scheduled to be discussed in a session; it means that each paper will be given 20 minutes for presentation. We recommend using 15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for discussion. As chairperson you are responsible for the smooth running of the presentations and for ensuring that speakers follow the conference and session schedule.

In some tracks, 5 papers are scheduled in a session; in this case, the track will last 1 hour and 45 minutes; as in the previous case, each paper will have 20 minutes and we recommend using 15 minutes for presentation and 5 minutes for discussion.

Before your session

• On-site, locate the room of your session in advance;
• Make sure to be in the conference room 15 minutes before the start of the session
  (Presenters are given the same instructions).

Starting your session

Your tasks as chairpersons will consist in:

• Opening the session and calling out the session title;
• Reminding the participants to switch off their mobile phones;
• Outlining the session format (15 minutes per presentation, 5 minutes for Q&A after each presentation);
• Introducing the session with the name of presenter, his/her affiliation and the papers titles;
• Keeping track of how much time each presenter has and maintaining the schedule of the session, giving the speaker, for example, a “warning” signal, if necessary:
• Fostering an atmosphere that encourages discussions; 
• During the discussion, if a question takes more than 30 seconds, asking the person to come to the point;
• Repeating or rephrasing the question if need be;
• Stopping the Q&A if necessary so that the next presentation can start on time;
• If time remains and the audience does not have any more questions, you can ask the questions that you have prepared;
• In the case of a withdrawn paper or a no-show, maintaining the open time slot by:
  • Facilitating an impromptu open discussion
  • Calling for a break until the start of the next presentation.

2. Guidelines for Discussants

As a discussant, your role is to:

• Read the papers in advance and find the commonalities among them;
• Try to frame and develop a conversation from that perspective;
• Identify shared topics, linked ideas/findings and contradictory ideas/results from presentations
• Identify the themes and points for debate in the session;
• Open the discussion by asking the audience to contribute with energy and enthusiasm.

3. Guidelines for Presenters

The conference programme allocates a maximum of 20 minutes to each paper consisting in 15 minutes of presentation and 5 minutes of discussion. The chairperson of each session is responsible for the smooth running of the presentations and for ensuring that speakers follow the conference schedule. Some questions will be taken either after individual presentations or at the end of a session which typically regroups four to five presentations in a similar field.

We kindly ask you to adapt the number of your slides to fit within the 15 minutes timeframe.

For your presentation, we would like to provide a few tips which will help you designing it:

• Ensure font and background colours display clearly;
• Limit your graphics to one to three per page;
• Limit bullets to six or less per slide, use no more than five or six words per bullet;
• Present one topic/theme per slide wherever possible; 
• Choose fonts for readability, Arial fonts - for instance - tend to be easy to read in the text body;
• Use one font style per visual and only two styles per presentation:
• Use large type size generally between 32 and 36 for headings, between 20 and 28 for bullets and sub-bullets and no smaller than 18 for plain text.

Organisers:

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