My Little Poster Revolution for COMP 2014 (Part 1)

... or Why Posters Suck 

This is the first posting in a series describing my experiment on creating a poster at the Canadian Organization of Medical Physics 2014 Conference. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3  and Part 4 for other  entries.

  
Attending the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Organization of Medical Physics has become standard operating procedure for me since I've joined the COMP board about 2 years ago. That has been a good thing, but it does limit my educational opportunities since, like many Medical Physicists, my professional allowance affords me to about 1 trip per year (and I'm not smart enough to be invited to other conferences).

While I enjoy the professional stuff, the real joy is in attending the scientific sessions. But I am often overwhelmed and mentally fatigued after a full conference. I chalk this fatigue up to simple information overload. If you follow my tweets, you may have read on my issues with the way conferences are organized. I'm trying to distill my thoughts into a manifesto of sorts which I will post here if I ever complete it. But it is starting to look something like this:

1. Scientific conference material should be driven by attendees, not by conference organizers.
2. Sessions should be organized to enhance and promote more social interaction.
3.  The amount of work invested in a submission should be proportional to the time devoted in preparing it.
4. There must be true interaction between experts and non-experts.
5. We must encourage open source models for data exchange and presentation.

Given these personal reflections, you can imagine how I might have felt when my submission was accepted for poster presentation (groan).

Now, I actually like creating posters. I like designing posters. I find it fun. But they require much more work, time, and money than an oral presentation. There are issues which make posters less favorable  than an oral presentations:

• Collapsing all content on a single page requires much more planning than an creating a Powerpoint. Whereas you might have 10-15 slides to describe your data, you have to organize all your science onto a single page.
• Narrative dialogue is much easier with serially presented slides, whereas with a poster you have to lead the reader through your story. This takes some effort to organize.
• There is a financial cost to printing that is not (generally) required if presenting orally.
• There are more logistical issues with the poster, such as 
• transporting it - it can be a real bother on planes, as opposed to a USB key for an oral presentation;
• mounting and dismounting it - poster presenters will spend at least an extra 10-20 minutes setting it up and taking it down, which is time not spent doing something else;
• if you have to arrive to the conference after it starts, or leave before it ends, you have to coax a colleague to put it up / take it down. Bother.
• The time dedicated to "poster viewing" may not actually be during the conference sessions itself. So you have a less compliant captive audience. 
• Sometimes the 'poster' viewing time is coupled with another social event, which means if you present a poster, you are not afforded the time to view the posters. Sometimes a conference will devote specific time where poster presenters should be present at their poster. This is good, but you miss out on the opportunity to mingle with the other poster presenters who must also stick around their posters. This effectively reduces the total number of potential interactions with you and your poster.
• The quality of interaction during a poster session is not serial, but more random in nature. Unlike questions during an oral presentation, the quality of questioning can build upon previous questions.While some questions during orals can be strange, you have a moderator to keep the focus and timeliness of questions asked.
• There is significant regurgitation of information during the poster session / interactions. For posters, you may find yourself answering the same questions to several individuals. Unlike the oral presentation, you don`t have captive audience to respond to.
 

Sure, there are a lot of benefits for having a poster, but in my personal opinion, the cost / benefit ratio for posters leaves me wanting.

So, this year, I plan to do something about it.