Presenter and Session Chair Guidelines

Paper Presentation Guidelines

Each paper session scheduled at ECIS 2024 is 90 minutes long and typically includes presentations of either 3 completed research papers or 2 completed research papers and 2 short papers. A completed research paper has 30 minutes allocated: 20 minutes for the presentation and 10 minutes for discussions. A short paper has 15 minutes allocated: 10 minutes for the presentation and 5 minutes for discussions. A session chair is assigned to each session.

Each paper session room is equipped with a computer, a screen, and a data projector. No laptops will be provided, so we recommend that session chairs and presenters bring their own laptops as a backup.

Presenters should arrive in the room during the break before their session to meet the session chair and ensure their presentation is properly loaded.

Session Chair

As the chair of a session, it is your responsibility to ensure that the presenters are in the room and have uploaded their presentations to the computer prior to the start of the session to ensure a smooth transition between presentations. When you are ready to start the session, you will make the audience feel welcome, introduce the session, and explain how it will unfold. During the session, you will introduce each speaker, facilitate discussion or Q&A periods, and ensure that time limits are strictly adhered to.

Sessions should start and end on time. It is the session chair’s responsibility to call the session to a close and thank the speakers and the audience. Each session room will have timecards for the chair to indicate the remaining minutes (5, 1, and 0) for each presenter.

Presenting Authors (Presenters)

Given the time limits for each paper presentation, presenting authors should use no more than 10 to 12 slides for completed research papers and 5 to 6 slides for short papers. Slides should have large font sizes and a limited amount of text to stimulate the audience’s thinking about the research question, the unique aspects of the authors’ work, the key contributions of the research, and its most surprising results or implications.

Finally, we ask that each author practices their presentation at least once beforehand, as thinking through a presentation is very different from speaking it out loud. A few practice sessions will help ensure a lively, focused presentation and avoid the stress of rushing through the last few minutes.

Audience

Although we will not have formal discussants of the papers in a session, we recommend that the audience reads the papers beforehand. Sometimes presenters are not fully able to get their message across in the presentation which might stifle questions and discussion, frustrating both the audience and the presenter. By reading the paper beforehand we can still have a lively discussion and we believe both the audience and the speaker will benefit from this.