Purpose of the Sustainability Summit

I am having reservations about helping out with the Sustainability Summit next year.

I would be interested in helping with an academic conference rather than a business conference, and for the topics to be a mix of policy and engineering. At the same time, I'm not against having speakers from the private sector. (For example, I think getting someone to talk about the Walmart initiative to calculate the carbon footprint of all of their products would be great). But I want more substantial content in policy, planning, and engineering. And I don't think there needs to be as much focus on conference paraphernalia like name-tags, etc.

It's important to me that it's free to MIT students, graduate as well as undergraduate. I don't see the value at all in limiting the space, especially when we probably have plenty of it. Plus, most engineering students only attend conferences when it's free for them, usually since their department will typically send them.

I thought that actually the Focus on Climate Change Symposium in Spring 2008 was really good. That was a three day event where each department hosted talks related to climate change. All the events were free and many were heavily attended.

In last year's summit, we tried a scenario format in hopes that the speakers would demonstrate real-time integrated problem solving and to encourage deeper discussion. That largely failed mostly because there was simply not enough time for each speaker to present even one argument much less respond to others' proposals. Plus, it was clearly frustrating for our audience, many of whom have a lot of opinions and personal experiences to draw upon, and were eager to ask questions and give their own two cents.

I think we should have the breakout session format with smaller audience and more speakers. For the larger talks, stick to a format where one speaker is presenting for half the time, and answering questions for half the time. To make it thought-provoking, we may present opposing/alternate proposals back to back so that the second talk is like a rebuttal. Basically have more of a debate format.