Chairing a poster session at a scientific conference is a challenging task as it implies direct questioning and dialogue on synthesised points of a scientific work. The job of the chairperson is to make the session informative, interesting and lively by facilitating excellent communication between the speakers and the audience. The following are guidelines for chairpersons to help make this happen.
Poster presentations are organised into two parts:
The time of the poster pitches and the poster session (Author-in-attendance time) of your specific session is published in the conference programme.
Preparation for poster pitches:Invite poster presenters in advance to present 1–2 slides about their poster.
In their letter of schedule poster authors will be asked to prepare 1–2 slides about their poster. However, direct invitation by the session convener(s)/chair(s) one or two weeks before the conference may be helpful (a tool to address all poster authors of your session is available in the online session organisation tools).
You may of course prefer to introduce the posters of the session you are chairing yourself. This will involve asking all poster presenters to provide 2–3 sentences on the main message of their poster or a slide you could use. Again, the tool in the online session organisation system will help you to address all poster authors without having to collect any email addresses.
Otherwise, many of the "rules" prepared for the chairperson guidelines for oral sessions apply accordingly for the poster introduction slot:
Authors of posters are requested to attend to their poster during the time their poster presentation is scheduled. As the chairperson you should try to attend to as many posters of your session as possible. This task could be split, especially for sessions having many posters, by nominating more than one chairperson.
The ideal approach for a poster session would be that the Chairperson gathers and guides the audience from poster to poster, invites the authors to present their posters for 1–2 minutes and stimulate discussions afterwards.
However, this approach may have to be adapted to local circumstances: the number of posters, size of the audience, but also limited space in front of a poster board.
Prepare yourself for the session by reading the abstracts of the contributions beforehand. Thus, you will always be aware of what to expect and be in a good position to instigate a discussion with the poster presenter.
Get to the venue early and make sure you know in which area posters of your session are located and which are the poster board numbers that are allocated to posters of your session.
You can check with the Copernicus staff at the registration desk whether they have registered, or go through the poster area and check whether the posters have already been put up at the designated poster boards.
Normally (one of) the convener(s) who prepared the session is also chairing (part of) the session. Should this not be possible, speakers/authors may be nominated by the appropriate convener(s) or asked by the meeting organiser to act as chairperson of a particular sub-session. In order for the meeting organiser to maintain the quality of the scientific programme, it is essential that the chairpersons are aware of the tasks and how to lead a session and discussions.
If your session is large, i.e. consists of more than 8–10 posters, then it may be advisable to nominate more than one chairperson for the poster session.
