Annual Report 2013, Istanbul

The support of the Istanbul Local Organising Committee and the EERA office was, once again, very important to the success of the ERC 2013 Emerging Researchers’ conference which involved over 200 participants from more than 40 countries. This year the Emerging Researchers’ Conference included:
-    38 paper sessions; the paper sessions had 30 themes and were chaired by 30 mentors. From a total of 201 submissions 197 were accepted. We had 49 withdraws and 13 no shows.
-    4 interactive poster sessions (in which participants were encouraged to use a new presentation format called Pecha Kucha) ;
-    3 network workshops (held by networks 9, 10 and 25) ;
-    2 workshops (a writing workshop organized by EERJ and a Doctoral Defence workshop organized by Vernon Trafford and Dr. Shosh Leshem) ;
-    20 EERA bursaries (one of which was funded by the SAGE publishers);
-    The overall quality of the papers was higher than last year;
-    The paper sessions were interesting, with very good presentations and with plenty of audience participation;
-    Social event went well (the venue was nice although it seemed short of food) but we expected more participants (many participants arrived to Istanbul during the first day of the conference so perhaps that was the reason why they didn’t show up);
-    Social event for the bursary winners went well and it was a good opportunity for networking;
-    No major ICT problems with the computers in the rooms for the sessions were reported;
-    We had a good feedback regarding all workshops although two of them (NW10 Research Ethics: Committees, Creativity and Care + NW25 Doing Children’s Rights-informed Educational Research) had just a few people in the audience;
-    We received several praises about the organization of the event and EERA’s Office;
-    Best poster competition went well and the winner was at the closing ceremony to receive her certificate;
-    Wireless connection: not all operating systems were planned (e.g. Linux and Windows phones);
-    For two days the ERC online program was not available (just before the conference);
-    Poster exhibition didn’t have all the posters because the authors took it with them after the poster sessions (they seemed to not have read the emails with the instructions about what to do);
-    The keynote that was scheduled for the end of the conference did not come and we were told to only 10 minutes in advance by her replacement that did a keynote speech of only 25 minutes; later on LOC provided an explanation for this and apologized; the closing ceremony had to be brought forward an hour (which caused us to lose some participants);
-    Lunches were considered very poor.