Why is it 2 hours??
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What if you never had them all in the same place/time and you spread it out over a week. And you provided the science asynchronously as videos and then you engaged in discussion on different channels, like a wiki site or a forum, and you then used a match making tool to do either 1:1 connections, or? small group connections (4-5 people) over the week??
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How many people are in the group??
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100?? If everyone were to meet and talk to everyone else for 15 minutes, you would have 25 hours of conversation.?
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If you drop that to groups of 5, then you would have 5 hours of conversation.??
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Stuffing those connections into 2 hours seems a bit tricky.?
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And then there are the dynamics of who gets to speak when....?
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If you lighten up on some constraints (time, duration, synchronous), you give yourself options for other serendipity to happen.??
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I have had great experiences going to conferences where I skipped the presentations and just used the match making tool (in this case Brella) to meet with folks who had questions for the whole time.?
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I bet that there is an opportunity to do "better" with a reconfigured semi-asynchronous process spread out over some period of time ( perhaps a bit more than a week), which would create a much higher sense of connection.?
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None the less, there are plenty of tools to play with if you want to try different synchronous things.?
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We use Remo as a way to drive things, because it gives us the opportunity to let people mingle in small groups on their own, and yet bring people back to focus on talks.?
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How many people?
How many talks?
what percentage of the time is doing mingling vs presentations?
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If you are going to JAM? 80% of the time into presentations, then you should just make the talks be videos that you send to people ahead of time. Just so you have time for mingling.?
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So, I hope that I am highlighting some alternative ways to think about the task beyond the technology question.?
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Leilani Henry