Attendee Feedback Summary

TxHATS Experts in attendance at the March 2015 meeting were polled about their experience at the meeting and what they’d like to see more of at future gatherings. Here’s a summary of the results. To begin, we asked, what were their main reasons for attending? Experts listed networking, finding collaborators for specific projects, building community, seeing friends, and learning about different kinds of interdiscplinary collaboration in art-sci-tech Did the gathering meet those goals? 6 of 8 responders said “Yes”; 2 of 8 responders said “Somewhat.”

Survey: 8 out of 19 people in attendance responded to the survey!

Attendees: There were 15 women and 6 men in attendance.

Astrophysics, geophysics, neuroscience, physics, photography, space art, journalism, economic development and business incubation, AI in theater, land museum and science gallery curation, holography and more.

What I Loved! & What I Learned!

• “Feeling “a part of” a community even though everyone is doing very different things.”
• “Convening people who have never met but have overlapping interests.”
• “Meeting face to face and learning what others are doing and thinking are priorities going forward.”
• “The opportunity to pick people’s brains.”
• “Meeting new people involved in far-reaching projects, some in the university systems, some beyond.”
• “I liked the first set of self-introductions in which I learned what different people do…and then the second in expressing what I wanted to get and connecting with a couple of people.”
• “Hearing about people’s projects and interests – some informally during one-on-one interactions and some from their formal presentations.”
• “Deeper understanding of the variety of art-science communities, practices and their various objectives.”

What Would Make Future Meetings More Valuable?

• “Concrete take-aways.”
• “Smaller group-specific outcomes.”
• More time for informal conversation. “…there is no substitute for in person time to forge relationships and really try to understand each other. Out of these relationships grow collaborations and future projects.”
• “I liked that Sally brought some work with her, maybe more of that.”
• “Inviting potential funders or those with projects who need collaborators.”

6 of 8 responders said “Just Right!”

2 of 8 responders said “Too short.”

My Suggestions for Success at the Next Meeting:

• Discussion on funding opportunities, particularly for non-academic research.
• Meeting face to face and learning what others are doing and thinking are priorities going forward.
• Future meetings will be more valuable the more of the same people are in attendance so the conversation can continue instead of starting over from scratch.
• Hands-on activity such as a hackathon or other project before the meeting so attendees could actually work on a project together and then use meetings to evaluate and debrief.
• I think we need to have more “meet-n-greet’ types of meetings AND some “action” meetings – the community is very broad and lots of good things happening so too early yet to have only one type of meeting.
• I think that we need more time to actually get to talk to each other. Perhaps more informal “mixing” time?
• I am keen to see us address rural issues.
• I wanted time to network in small groups – too much talking by individuals to all rather than focusing on themes and discussion.

Next Steps Attendees are Taking:

• Trying to keep in touch with participants.
• Working on clarifying how I define and communicate what I do so that it is easier to find collaborators.
• Trying to stay in contact and foster relationships and brainstorm about future projects. I hope to attend future meetings.
• Pursuing conversations and ideas through e-mail and Skype with various people from the meeting.
• Contacting a couple of people to work on proposals for significant projects, check out the websites of several people to learn more about what they do.
• Already doing this: following up with individuals whom I share interests with… referring new folks I met to those who have something they might share.
• Using the subjects talked about to develop new angles for my work.

What I Want Going Forward:

• Having a way of building on this and not having to so a restart each time.
• How to find a balance between each person’s individual needs and the bigger picture needs.
• How to discuss the issues without getting too caught up in the details of a specific project’s needs?
• We need to grow the Texas HATS email list. It has only been used for announcements, so we only have 100 people on the list right now.
• Updates on the project’s progress or invitations to see final work if possible.

Positive Comments:

“Nice meeting, thanks for organizing it.”

“The food and drinks were amazing.”

“The variety of attendees was great.”

“The variety of attendees was great.”

“The location was perfect.”

“I want to help organize the next one.”

A Few Critiques:

“Perhaps more informal “mixing” time?”

“Group was too large to do in depth discussions.”

“Make more time for individuals to talk to each other in informal setting.”

“Either adjust the time spent on activities or have the meeting be 1 or 2 hours longer.”