Thank you all who wrote feedback on the “wailing wall” during the EAHIL2019 workshop in Basel!

The EAHIL Board members have collected them and Lotta Haglund has sorted them. The comments are mine.

• Thank you – we’re trying to our best but the current Board members won’t continue forever. 🙂
• Thank you for the liaison proposal – we’ll talk about it.
• About new SIGs or special interest groups or sub groups: Please, write a proposal with aims and purpose for the board and we’ll add it to our next meeting agenda. Usually a group a people who would join the group and recruit more members writes a paper and emails it to the EAHIL President. See the SIG pages for inspiration. The Board is not able to start the process of forming a new SIG without this kind of proposal.
• About conferences and workshops: Lately they have often been mixes of both. The Dublin 2017 event was a combined ICML conference and EAHIL workshop, and in the Cardiff 2018 conference there were, in addition to presentations and posters, also lots of interactive workshops.

• I’m sure the Basel LOC members and the International Programme Committee members are happy about most of these comments. 🙂
• About the meals: I think it was very clearly stated on the registration page what (like lunches, coffees, dinner) was included, and all the meals and coffees are also mentioned in the programme. You can always ask, if you’re not certain.
• About the room and group sizes: The organisers did not expect so many delegates. They were overwhelmed about the interest and raised the original maximum participant numbers of most workshops by about ten more people and did their best with the venue they had. It must have been hard trying to balance between group size and room size. As for the hot weather…
• If you want to combine attending a conference/workshop to exploring the city, you should probably add extra days to your trip instead of assuming that you will have lots of free hours. EAHIL events are work.
• It’s a good idea to consult a map before booking a hotel, and maybe also reading travellers’ online comments about it. Please, also take into consideration the price-quality ratio.

• I’m sure these comments are taken into account by the EAHIL2020 LOC and IPC, and the organisers of the other future events, too.
• I like all the suggestions regarding the name tags and cutting down the amount of plastic. 🙂
• It’s very important to remember that usually (there are some exceptions) the EAHIL event organisers (LOC) are doing it for the first (and probably only) time. EAHIL has Guidelines for event organisers and all kinds of advice and information is gladly shared by previous EAHIL event organisers and the EAHIL Board members, but each event is – and should be – different, and not everything can be predicted, planned or instructed.

Your feedback is appreciated and very valuable. Thank you!

Photo: Silvia Mahler