Planning Your 5-day Workshop

The Schedule

The idea of a BIRS workshop is to allow the exchange of the latest and most important information in your field and to allow people the time to discuss and brainstorm together in an inspiring and stress-free setting. We leave the detailed structure of your meeting up to you. However, we wish to encourage the scheduling of some unstructured time and discourage the notion that every participant should be invited to speak.

It is very useful for BIRS and for the participants of your workshop if at least some of the scheduling for talks and other activities is determined in advance. This is particularly true of the first day.

Workshop schedules must be entered by setting up an account first. To do that, please follow instructions below:

Register for workshops account here.

After registretion, please login here.

Use this interface to keep your workshop schedule up-to-date. When you are ready, click the “Publish this schedule” switch at the bottom of the schedule page. Your schedule will appear on your workshop’s web page, so that the workshop participants can see it.

Schedule lectures by selecting a name from the drop-down list of confirmed participants. The automated video recording system will use scheduled lectures (the items with names selected) to add titles to the recordings, and to automatically publish videos with correct attribution. It is important to keep your online schedule up-to-date during the workshop, so as not to mis-label recorded lectures.

Workshops run Monday through Friday. Friday programming can be difficult since some of your group will have to leave on Friday morning if they have flights out of Calgary before mid-afternoon. We advise to not schedule any talks for the Friday afternoon and to keep the morning sessions flexible with perhaps problem sessions or something informal.

Video Recording

BIRS now has a fully automated lecture recording system, and would like to record as many talks as possible. Please see the Automated Video Production page for an overview of how to use the system and how it works, and the announcement from the BIRS Scientific Director concerning the recording and live streaming of lectures.


Accommodations, getting to BIRS and other relevant information are available under Resources for Participants.