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Excellent Railfuture conference, but some setup lessons

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2013-11-03 09:52:12 - Graham Ellis

When I attend events these days, I take a professional look at how they're organised - from the presentation right through to the back-room issues. I was in the town hall in Oxford yesterday for the Railfuture annual conference and first and foremost it was great to see so many people (147, I understand) there, to hear some excellent presentations, to catch up with certain people, to make a few new contacts (but getting in touch with new people was not my objective) and to listen to the mood and direction of people looking forward for rail. A very high scoring conference on that basis, and THANK YOU to Rail Future for organising it.

But what did I learn from the setup? What must we emulate, and what must we avoid?

* No signage outside on arrival - just some poor chap holding up an A4 agenda with the Railfuture logo on the top.

* The seat pitch would have been fine for a primary school, but the rows of seats were packed in and make the Theatre Royal Bath (my bete noir of seating) or a high density train look positively luxurious. I wasn't the only one - the room filled around the side and front edges of the seat blocks, where everyone could stick their feet out. And so un-necessary if there had only been 2 or 3 rows fewer seats!

* The microphone was strapped to the stand, and the acoustics were such that it had to be used. Perhaps a previous mic was stolen, but it did mean that the more animated speakers faded in and out. Perhaps the speakers should have used the same roaming mike that was passed around the audience for questions?

* The walls are dark wooden panels. Fair enough, except that the projector screen that necessitated was rather too small. The speakers [people] were excellent, but the maps and diagrams, and much of the text, was unreadable.

* Catering - lunch was not laid our for the storm surge of people. It should have been tressles down the middle of the room, with all plates at the entrance - or someone standing in the lunch room entrance sending half the people to start at the far end. As it was, we had the "usual scenario" of long queues, empty platters and a lack of plates at the start of the room and it was left to one or two of us customers to go and collect plates from the far side. Insufficient sandwiches - probably calculated for an average audience with a 50 / 50 ratio of ladies to gentlemen. But our audience was around 95% male.

Not saying we would have been perfect, but had this been happening at (say) the Melksham Assembly Hall, I suspect we would have had reasonable seating pitch, posters outside, enough food and a thumping great screen and sound system. Of course, we don't have usable trains this year, so we couldn't have hosted it. After Oxford this year, Cambridge are going to try next year. Let's see if they can provide the same excellent content!