Dear Session Chair/Facilitator and Paper authors:

The Participatory Design Conference is indeed a place where we hope that sessions will involve a great deal of participation on the part of session participants! It is with this spirit of dialogue in mind that I offer the following guidelines to help authors plan their presentations and session chairs plan for facilitating interaction.

PDC2000 will start Tuesday night 28 Nov at 5 with an Opening Session of participatory music and discussion of interaction among musicians and among musicians and 'audience'.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday will have plenary talks, paper sessions and work-in-progress report sessions, as well as evening reception (wed), banquet (Thursday) and a Friday lunch with a speaker from National Public Radio. The conference will end at 5 pm on Friday.

Paper Sessions (full papers): Two papers will be presented in one session; there will be four parallel sessions at each time slot. Each session will be in a workshop-style room which can hold up to 40 people (although it will be possible to open door panels to expand if necessary).

Work-in-Progress (WIP) (short reports): Three reports will be presented in one session with the same number of sessions and room sizes as above.

We have also asked WIP authors to make posters of their ideas which could be presented at the Wednesday evening reception/poster/demo session. Other authors are invited to do so as well.

Author Presentations: Please keep the small workshop style rooms in mind when preparing your presentation. Overhead transparencies or a presentation from your laptop to a TV screen are ok. Keep it simple, please, and plan for absolutely no more than a 20 minute presentation for Full papers, or a 15 minute report for WIP reports. Prepare your presentation with audience participation in mind. Gear your talk to engage a dialogue with others.

Chairs/facilitators: We are planning to send you via email the papers for your session. Please read them and try to find links which could engage the room in discussion; making sure of course that it is not the authors who are the only participants, and keeping (sometimes too talkative presenters) to the time limit.

Ellen Balka (ebalka@sfu.ca) will coordinate Session chairs, so please email her if you have questions.

Sincerely, Joan Greenbaum Program co-chairperson

www.cpsr.org/conferences/pdc2000 check the website for details