Procedure for CMS Colloquium Introducers and Summarizers.
Current for 2002-3

I. GENERAL
Each CMS Grad Student is required to do at least one introduction of a Colloquium speaker and one summary in the year. A schedule of the colloquia is available here.

II. RECRUITMENT
Sarah will be recruiting students to fill these two positions for CMS-only colloquia, and Professor Thorburn assigns students (usually second-year students) to summarize Communications Forum colloquia. If you are interested in the either of these roles for the coming week's colloquium, please contact either Sarah or Professor Thorburn, as appropriate. They will update you on the availability of the position.

III. INTRODUCTION
Investigate the speaker by yourself. If necessary, the Colloquium Committee can direct you to the MIT contact that helped organize the speaker's appearance, who should then be able to suggest where to go to find bio information and contact information as well. Quite often, there will be sufficient information on the Internet to pull together a good introduction. Ideally, you should chat with the speaker before the colloquium begins to double check bio info, and see if there is anything they would like you to add.

You may also want to give a copy of the bio information to the summarizer as a courtesy.

IV. SUMMARY
During Colloquium:
Take thorough notes during the colloquium. You may wish to use a tape recorder.

Writing the Summary:
There are no specific guidelines for writing the summary, but here is a general sense of what we want:

The summary will be posted on the CMS website, so it should be as professional as possible. It should summarize the key ideas of the Colloquium for someone who did not attend the event. You may also want to include some meaningful quotes or key phrases. The language should strive to be clear and objective and should try as much as possible to capture the speaker's perspective. You should also include a summary of the questions and answers. This only needs to pick up on major strands. Do not try to get every question and response. Include relevent links in the text or at the end as seem appropriate.

Please refer to this sample taken from the Communication Forum site. (Look under "Summary")
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/children.html

*For your personal reference and for the benefit of the Colloquium recruiters and webmaster, please note the date, time and location of the event.

Submitting the Completed Summary:
Once you have finished writing your summary, please forward it to the assigned proofreader for the event, who will read it and send it back to you with comments. If the speaker at the colloquium is in-house (ie a professor or researcher at MIT) then you may forward your summary to them as a courtesy and for the sake of accuracy. You should then forward the revised summary to Sarah and Brian, who will post it on the CMS web site.