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Meet The SMX West 2008 Programming Team

As co-chairs of SMX West 2008, Chris Sherman and I oversee the agenda of over 50 editorial sessions. Pulling together the session ideas, formats and speakers is no easy challenge, especially when you have high quality standards that are backed by a guarantee. Fortunately, we have an excellent team of people working with us on the show that I’d like to introduce and pay credit to.

Each individual session has a “panel coordinator” who is in charge of selecting speakers and establishing the session format (who will talk for how long, on what topics and so on). The coordinators ensure that attendees get a session that is well orchestrated. Rather than speakers overlapping each other on topics (or being off-topic for the session), SMX panel coordinators ensure that everyone is set to deliver a complementary performance.

For SMX West 2008, our panel coordinators are:

In most cases, panel coordinators will also serve as moderator of the session that they put together. However, we have a few cases where a different person may serve as the session moderator, such as when a panel coordinator might assemble two sessions running at the same time.

Moderation is an important part of programming. Moderators are there to crack the whip if the speakers don’t stick to their times, plus they help elicit further responses to questions posed by the audience. Moderators themselves are also often great sources of knowledge and can help provide a further perspective on panels. Below are the SMX session moderators to date, in addition to the panel coordinators who are already also serving as moderators:

SMX also has a second type of moderator that we’re debuting at SMX West. This is the Q&A Moderator. SMX devotes a huge amount of time for Q&A and discussion, as we feel it’s an essential part of a successful and valuable session. However, just picking hands from the audience is a fairly random and unrepresentative way to decide on what to put to the panel.

Our solution is the Q&A Moderator. During most SMX sessions, attendees will be able to send questions to the Q&A Moderator. We’ll describe the exact process in the future — but it will be easy and accessible to everyone in the audience. The Q&A Moderator — who is an expert themselves on the session topic — will group similar questions together. Then they will assemble a top list that gets put to the audience to vote on. This way, the entire audience can influence which questions get asked. As the Q&A period progresses, new questions will be posted and voted on.
Here are our Q&A Moderators:

Wondering how you become a panel coordinator, session moderator or Q&A moderator? It’s pretty straight-forward. We work with our own staff from Search Engine Land along with others who have typically distinguished themselves by being outstanding speakers. To learn about speaking at SMX, see this page. Most sessions are now filled for SMX West, but other shows will have openings in the future. Remember, we always announce when new sessions openings are available here on the SMX Blog.

Finally, is there an SMX Advisory Board like some other conferences have? Absolutely — and it’s a pretty inclusive group of people. It’s you. It’s anyone that ever attends one of our shows. Whether you provide feedback to using our formal evaluation forms, send us email or just talk to us at the show, we take all that advice back to constantly reshape and improve our events going forward. So congrats! If you’ve been to one of our shows and provided some feedback, feel free to link to this post and name yourself as an advisory board member!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under SMX West, Speaking. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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