What happens at a meeting

Updated on 6/1/22

Our meetings officially start at 10 am PT on the third Saturday of each month, with Zoom being up by around 9:40 am PT, so you can join ahead of time. Since our meetings moved online, they are now pretty consistent. We plan to continue to run online meetings when in-person events resume for the benefit of those who appreciate remote attendance capability. Occasionally we might adjust the meeting time to accommodate a presenter from certain time zones in other parts of the world. If we do this, it usually means we’ll move the meeting time to the afternoon. This will be announced well in advance and will appear in the calendar at the special time.

Welcome: My name is Steve and I usually run the meetings. Jump online early (~9:40 am PT or so) and introduce yourself. Meet the other people attending. We have new people all the time as well many faithful, longtime members who have been attending for years. We use the Zoom Chat during the meeting to share useful information and to streamline the info-gathering process for me. This info will be posted along with the YT video, meeting slides, and if available, the presentation slides, later on our website in “Monthly Meetings” under “Past Meetings”. 

Club Business: The meetings are friendly and informal, but follow a regular agenda that will be presented at the beginning of the slides. We’ll start by discussing any club business related to the mission and purpose, location, events, news of upcoming robotics events, and local activities, then upcoming presentations and schedule, Robothon activities and event summaries, and then anything else related to club business, operations, or activities. We then move into your opportunity to share.

Show-n-Tell/Round-the-Room/Web: This is your opportunity to shine. Show us your projects, ask questions, announce events, seek help or assistance, etc. The style is generally an informal demonstration or presentation, but feel free to share what you’re doing or what help you need. Attendees have the opportunity to share what they are working on, ask questions, and to seek help from other club members. This portion of the meeting is unscripted, so its duration isn’t known ahead of time. Sometimes the sharing during this time suggests a formal presentation. If so, consider sharing about your project briefly now, but more extensively as a formal presentation, at a future meeting. See the Presenter Information page for details on doing this, and contact me at the club email, so we can get you scheduled.

This part of the meeting will be wrapped by about 11am (PT), sometimes earlier so we can take a short 5-10 minute break prior to the formal presentation. Take this opportunity to run to the restroom, grab a cup of coffee, a snack, and get settled for the presentation without missing anything. At in-person meetings, this is also brief opportunity for the above, and for people to mingle, meet others, and rummage through the swap-meet items. 

Presentation: After the break, I’ll call everyone back for the formal presentation, which begins with an introduction of the presenter and then turning things over to the presenter. The presentation should run until noon (PT) or so, but might go a little longer, though not past 12:30pm PT.

The goal of presentations is to share technological developments, project progress, research activities and results,  contest development activities, etc., in an interactive format. Even if we do watch videos, the format will still have interactive format but with a facilitator so that through the process, there are opportunities to ask questions and share ideas.

Presenters are invited guest speakers or teams sharing their robotics experience, about a technology-related topic, perhaps a college professor or student sharing about their research work, an open discussion on a pre-defined topic facilitated by myself or other club member, or a Society member presenting on their robot or other interesting project. Before things shut down, we had mostly in-person presentations with a few online, but since then, all presentations have moved online which has enabled us to book folks from any reasonable time zone on the planet, not just locals to the PNW at our normal meeting time. Once in-person meetings resume, in-person presentations are always appreciated when possible. Sometimes we’ll move out meeting later in the day to accommodate presenters from the far east. Being able to bring presenters  from anywhere in the world to our meetings has vastly expanded the content of presentations and our pool of possible presenters.

Anything that you think might be interesting to the Society is a possibility. If you are interested in formally presenting at one of our future meeting, reach out to us and see the Presenter Information page for more details on what we’re looking for.

Afterwards: After the presentation at most meetings, the meeting officially ends and recording is stopped. Feel free to hang around and chat during the Robotics Discussion that follows. Anything interesting can be brought up at this time. In person, you can hang out and chat with people, follow-up on questions about things shared, meet more people, see demos of things people brought, visit with the presenter, etc. Online, the Zoom meeting will continue as long as people are interested, within reason, of course.