21 years ago 20041031

0a1,60
CHAIR SUCCESSION

...a steady stream of conferences is ensuing in steady
state. You need to identify a stream of suitable conference
chairs to lead the conferences.

                 * * *

Effective leadership most often emerges from experience.
On one hand, you want to choose a conference chair who
will draw people to the conference, and that implies that
the individual has community visibility and credibility. However,
in the pattern community, people tend not to come to the
conference based on the credibility of its technical program,
so the program chair personality is of little consequence in
marketing. People have little enough insight into the organizational
abilities of the conference chair to be able to make a decision to
attend based on who fills that position.

The conference chair should have close ties to the geographic
proximity of the venue.

Hillside membership could be a criterion for being a chair,
but the qualifications for such membership are not well
delineated. The nomination and membership process is
sufficiently informal as to not constitute a quality gate.
Yet it would be good for the successor to bear some
community credentials.

One could train conference chairs, but structured training is
difficult in a geographically distributed community. However,
each conference community comes together at a single
venue annually, and that provides a focus for bringing the
new chair on board.

Therefore:
Create a lineage of chair succession. This year's program chair is next year's conference chair. Next year's program chair is chosen by this year's conference chair and program chair.

                 * * *

This has the conjectural problem that one person
fills two different skill sets: one for program
chair, and one for conference chair.
However, in most PLoPs
these two roles blur and are differentiated largely by the
connection the conference chair has to the venue. Because
ChairSuccession causes the role to change, it may lead to a
mismatch between the chair and the venue.
To fix this, use VenueFollowChair (as is done for VikingPLoP)
or SmallConference (which implies that the constituency for
a conference is small enough that all of the organizers can
be local people, as has been the tradition for KoalaPLoP).

This pattern was started almost from the beginning at
EuroPLoP, which has found it to be successful. Lack of
this pattern at other PLoPs has caused decisions that are
out of line with widely agreed policies and even with the
culture of the community.

[Up to TipsForConferenceChair]

26 seconds later ChairSuccession

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marketing. People have little enough insight into the organizational
marketing. Attendees have little enough insight into the organizational