Session Chair Guidelines

Overview of session chair responsibilities

You must be registered for the conference to chair a session.

Coordinating with speakers

You will be sent an email with contact information for all of the presenters in your session. Please contact all of the presenters to re-confirm their participation and to see if they have any questions. GSA will send you suggested text along with the email addresses of the presenters. If there are any technical questions that you cannot answer, the presenter should forward their question to GSA@warpspeedtech.com and copy gsaconferences@genetics-gsa.org.

You should check your session day and time by viewing the Schedule of Events. All times are shown in Eastern Daylight Time/GMT -04:00/UTC -04:00

View Schedule of Events » 

Presenters and session chairs will be asked to join their session ten minutes before the start of the overall session (not just their specific talk). At this time the chat window will be used for communication between the session chair and the presenters.

In the week before the conference (April 13–17)

• • You will receive an email from Zoom this week with a “panelist” link for your session. If you have not received your email by April 17, please email gsa@warpspeedtech.com. THIS LINK SHOULD NOT BE SHARED.
  • Download or update the Zoom client on your computer (phones and tablets are not recommended for presenters). Please use https://zoom.us/test to test your Zoom audio and permissions in advance, so you are not asked to set your permissions during your session. For Mac users, setting permissions requires you to restart the application, which you won’t want to do during your session.
  • Contact all of the presenters in your session by April 16 to re-confirm their participation and to see if they have any questions. GSA will send you suggested text along with the email addresses of the presenters. If there are any technical questions that you cannot answer, the presenter should forward their question to GSA@warpspeedtech.com and copy gsaconferences@genetics-gsa.org.

• Make sure you are registered for TAGC 2020 Online.

During the conference

10 minutes before your session starts

• Click the special Zoom presenter (panelist) access link emailed by Zoom. If you can’t find it, contact GSA@Warpspeedtech.com. Alternatively, you can access the session as an attendee by logging in to the Program Planner or Mobile App. Once there you can type a message in the chat window to the Zoom Host that you have arrived and are the session chair.
• Open the chat and Q&A windows. Chat will be used for technical support.
• Send a message in the chat window to tell technical support staff (Zoom Host) that you have arrived.
• Test your sound by speaking to the technical support staff and any waiting presenters.

During your session

Welcome, code of conduct, and introducing speakers

At the beginning of your session, a slide will automatically be shown announcing the name of the session, your name, and other important information. The session chairs are also asked to make the following oral announcements at the beginning of the session:

• Each presenter will have a total of 15 minutes. After 15 minutes we will move on to the next presenter.
• Be advised that we will monitor this session for Code of Conduct violations.
• This session is being recorded.
• If you have questions for the presenter, type your questions in the Q&A window at the bottom of the screen and we will get to as many as possible at the end of each talk.

For each talk, announce the title and the presenter’s name.

Keeping time

It is important to keep your session on time. Each talk is allotted a total of 15 minutes allowing 12 minutes for the presentation and three minutes for questions. Zoom will automatically cut off the session five minutes after the scheduled stop time so it is critical that you keep speakers on time to make sure all speakers are able to present. Additionally, attendees will be coming in and out of sessions based on the scheduled time of individual talks.

Technical support staff will post the following messages in the Q&A window (visible only to presenters and session chairs) to let you know how much time remains:

• After 12 minutes, “3 minutes remain, start Q&A”
• After 14 minutes and 30 seconds, “30 seconds remain, wrap up”
• After 15 minutes, “STOP”

You will move on to the next talk when STOP appears in the Q&A window. If the speaker is still presenting you will have to politely interrupt the speaker to move on to the next person so that each speaker has their full amount of time.

If you’d prefer, you can ask your presenters to close the Q&A and chat windows so they are not distracted, and you can unmute your microphone to give verbal timing reminders.

Monitoring, choosing, and reading questions

Attendees will submit questions using the Q&A window. The contents of the Q&A window will be visible to you and the presenters only. Presenters have been instructed that their talk should be 12 minutes and to allow three minutes for questions. Based on the available time, you will select questions from the Q&A window to ask the presenter. If no time remains for questions, you will move on to the next presenter. If there are no questions and there is remaining time, please be prepared with your own question to ask the presenter.

A transcript of the questions posted in the Q&A window will be made available to the presenters after the session.

Speakers are not able to use the Q&A window to ask questions of other speakers and so they will send any questions to you via the chat window.

Poster previews

At the end of your session a slide will appear with information on the Poster Previews (if any) that were assigned to the live session. Please encourage people to view the related posters and attend the live poster Q&As being held the week of April 27.