[DiGRA UK] DiGRA UK: plans for the future

[Paolo Ruffino]

Dear all,
Esther and I have been chatting for a while about re-starting the meetings
of the DiGRA UK chapter. This is something I have also briefly discussed
with some of you at the latest DiGRA-FDG conference in Dundee.

The plan, as we imagined it so far, would be to have a 1-2 days event in
spring or early summer 2017, before the international DiGRA conference in
Australia. We need a venue, and this is the first obstacle.

We also need to decide about the format. I have got the impression,
speaking with some of you, that we want to achieve at least two things with
this event. First of all, we want to preserve its informality and use it as
an occasion for networking and to get to know each other, which is really
important if we want to involve postgraduate students and, more generally,
scholars who might be doing game research in isolation within their
departments and who are unlikely to reach the international DiGRA
conference.

Second, we also need to justify this event as a research leave. Thus, we
need to have paper presentations and/or workshop sections, and
presentations should receive meaningful feedback from the other
participants.

The organisation depends, I think, on how much enthusiasm and support we
gather. We could advertise the event, once we know location and date, and
ask for paper and workshop proposals. These submissions could be
peer-reviewed, and we'll need volunteers for that. We should probably then
see how many submissions we have, and we should be flexible if we need to
have more than one parallel session. I am not happy with having too many
presentations at the same time, this does not need to be another big DiGRA,
but your comments are welcome on this.

For the networking aspect, we could offer everyone a chance to introduce
themselves with a 1 minute-1 slide session, which could work if we are less
than 20-25. Otherwise, we'll have to think about something else (the
solution might also just be having longer coffee breaks!).

If we are still interested and passionate about this, let's keep the ball
rolling and let's get things started! I have found previous regional
meetings to be very useful, and I would be sorry not to have more in the
near future!

Please feel free to post your comments, ideas, suggestions, and let us know
if you believe your institution could host the meeting. Thanks!

Best,

-- 
Dr. Paolo Ruffino
http://paoloruffino.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.digra.org/pipermail/uk/attachments/20161022/733aec44/attachment.html