In this post, I’ll try to give some insights into the more recent work and workflows of the global State of the Map (SotM) program committee. After having been a member of the SotM program committee for the last couple of years, I figured this might be useful or at least interesting for other program committees or content teams.

Please note that the views and experiences expressed in this post are my own and that they are mostly based on my memory. I’m also trying to just describe how we worked, which may not be the best way, maybe not even a recommendable one, but one that seemed to work for us. Just because it worked for us doesn’t mean it will work for others though, and vice versa.

In some way, this post is also a follow-up to a previous post of mine where I wrote about the software and services behind the State of the Map. I’ll try to avoid duplicating content, so see the previous post for more information about the tools and services that were used.

Organisation

As long as I’ve been on the program committee, it was always organised such that it was mostly split into a ‘core program committee’ (I’ll refer to it as ‘core team’ in the rest of this post) and the full program committee (I’ll refer to it as ‘program committee’ in the remainder of this post), which included all members including the core team. I don’t remember if this split was a conscious decision, if it just emerged based on asking the program committee members about who wanted to help with which tasks, or if there was another reason. But at least so far, we haven’t had a reason to change this.

Program Committee

The primary tasks of the program committee were reviewing and rating the submissions of the talks, workshops, etc. and providing feedback on e.g. the draft for the call for participation before it got published. Once the call for participation was published, the program committee members were also encouraged to announce it in their local communities.

Core Team

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After having been involved with the organization of the last few global State of the Map (SotM) conferences, I recently got asked if I could provide some information about the technical side of how hybrid events work to one of the organizers of a future local SotM conference. While writing down some of these details, I figured that this might be of general interest, hence this diary post which also contains various aspects about hybrid events based on our hybrid SotM 2022.

The post will try to cover the last three global SotMs and thus not only technical aspects of a hybrid conference: SotM 2020 was originally planned to take place in Cape Town, South Africa, but had to be moved to a purely online format for well-known reasons. Still for the same reasons, SotM 2021 was planned as an online conference from the beginning. And finally, SotM 2022 in Firenze was our first hybrid conference.

Please note that all views, opinions and experiences expressed in this post are mine and not necessarily shared by the SotM Organizing Committee or other SotM Organizing Committee members. The post is also mostly based on my personal memory only, so I certainly missed or wasn’t aware of many aspects and details, especially in all the areas where I wasn’t involved at all. It also concentrates on the technical side of things and how we did them, not so much on e.g. more social aspects or why we did something in the specific way we did it.

Organization and planning

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