Panels - Call For Participation

Proposal Submission deadline & Acceptance notification | Panel Program Committee | Duties of the Panel Moderator(s)

Proposal submission deadline:	December 21, 2008
Acceptance notification:	January 26, 2008

Panels should focus on emerging technologies, controversial issues, or unsolved problems in the World Wide Web community to stimulate lively, thoughtful, and thought-provoking debate. We expect the panelists to actively engage the audience and help them gain a deeper understanding of the issues. The goal of a panel is to debate and thus panels should always reflect more than one point of view.
All areas of interest to WWW participants are acceptable as a panel topic. Panel proposals will be accepted on the basis of their audience appeal, credentials of panelists, originality, and focus on disputed topics.

Panel Proposal Submission Procedure

Submissions should include:

Panel title
Panel organizer(s)/moderator(s)
Short description of the topic (suitable for inclusion in the program)
Panel objective, scope, and target audience
Detailed description of the topic, including suitable references
List of the debatable points of view
Panel format (e.g., frontal presentation, Q&A, etc.) including a detailed timeline covering all activities - (the entire panel duration should be 90 minutes)
The names and affiliations of the panelists, and their credentials in the form of a short bio
A statement for each panelist, indicating whether the panelist's participation is (a) confirmed or (b) pending in the case s/he has already been contacted and is not yet committed or (c) not yet contacted. At submission time, we expect that at least 50% of the panelists would have been confirmed, in particular senior panelists. Please do not "name-pad" your panel with unconfirmed panelists!
Short paragraph stating the credentials/bios of organizer(s), moderator(s) and each panelist.
The panel proposal should also indicate whether other similar panels have been formed recently in other conferences or workshops. If so, what is the difference?

Proposals should be 4-6 pages long and can be submitted in either HTML or PDF. Please send proposals for WWW2009 panels directly via the Panel Proposals Submission Site. A rolling acceptance policy will be followed: panel submissions will be considered as they arrive, and while most will receive deferred decisions, some may be immediately accepted or returned to the proposer for improvement.Inquiries can be sent to: panels-www2009 at dit.upm.es.

Panel format:

Panels should last 90 minutes and typically include three to five panelists plus a moderator. Be creative about the panel format. A typical format includes:

moderator introduction
brief position statements by domain experts (it's essential that this part does not exceed a total of 30 minutes divided by all panelists)
discussions (at least 40 minutes divided by all participants)
closing statements from panelists and moderator

You are welcome to use various forms of multimedia presentations to help engage the audience.

Panels Program Committee

Panels Chair:

Mark Manasse (Microsoft Research, USA)
Marianne Winslett (University of Illinois, USA)

Program Committee: To be announced.

Duties of the Panel Moderator(s)

The panel moderator is the most important participant in a panel. The moderator must take an active role during the panel to ensure that the panelists stay on time and on track and to stimulate debate.
The most important part of the moderator's job, however, occurs well before the panel starts. It is the duty of the moderator to force the panelists to prepare lively and controversial initial presentations and to be prepared for the debate part of the panel. Panel moderators thus must spend a significant amount of time "herding cats", i.e., getting the panelists to adequately prepare their pitch and making sure that each panelist will have a distinct non-trivial message or role. A panel is not a stage for panelists to give unrelated frontal presentations; we will give preference to panels that plan to actively engage the audience - be creative!