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Types of meetings
Annual Conference
The Society’s Annual Conference is generally held in September over a period of three or four days. The conference attempts to cover the full range of remote sensing and photogrammetry, with strong scientific and commercial content, usually structured around a general theme devised by the organiser. The conference is also the vehicle for the Society’s AGM and the presentation of the Society’s awards.
Evening Meetings
Evening meetings are typically held in a major city, such as London or Glasgow, and usually in collaboration with another Society, such as the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).
One-Day Meetings
The most popular format is the one-day meeting. These typically comprise a programme from 10.00am to 5.00pm, with between 6 and 10 invited speakers, as well as allocating time for questions and discussion (which are typically recorded for later publication). The topics are broad ranging and attendance is typically between 40 and 100. Many one-day meetings are hosted by Special Interest Groups (add a link to the SIG definition). However, there are no constraints on the subject for one-day meetings, provided the topic is deemed to be of interest to the Society’s membership and that the meeting does not overlap too closely with other meetings being organised around the same time. Advice on this aspect can be obtained from the Technical Programme Committee, whose aim is to provide a balanced meetings programme in any calendar year.
SIG Meetings
As part of their remit all special interest groups are expected to organise at least one meeting per year. These meetings may take the form of one-day meetings, workshops, technical debates, or themed sessions within the programme of the annual conference.
Student Meetings
Normally the Society does not seek to distinguish between Ordinary and Student members in terms of their contributions to technical meetings. However meetings are encouraged which are of more specific interest to Student Members of the Society, such as training courses and discussions of research methodology. Such meetings include the Annual Student Meeting, usually convened by the RSPSoc student representative to Council. The annual meeting provides an excellent social forum, and the opportunity for students to present their work, and hone their presentation skills, in front of a friendly external audience of their peers.
Technical Debates
In technical debates, invited speakers are selected to propose and second both sides of a motion, prior to opening the debate up to wider audience participation. Technical debates are suitable for half-day meetings (see also Evening Meetings).
Workshops
Workshops are similar to normal one-day technical meetings, except that they usually involve a level of audience participation beyond normal question-and-answer discussion. Additionally, the topic of a workshop meeting is often rather more specific than that of a one-day technical meeting, with the aim of advancing, for example, a particular research methodology, measurement programme, instrument design or calibration technique.
