Taking and Sharing Information
Plan to take information home for your own learning and future reference, and to share with others who were unable to attend.
Seek out information on specific topics, collect conference materials, and/or plan to present a session on what you have learned at the conference to your colleagues or community when you return.
Your personal learning goals should guide your approach to the conference. See the Getting the most out of the conference on this site. At registration you will be given the conference programme, and all the abstracts on either a CD-ROM or book. The book is quite large and harder to carry although can be easier for quick reference.
The conference website www.aids2008.org also has this information and will remain after the conference. The website will also have Power Point slides from some sessions.
Bring a notebook with you and take notes. Jot down the day, time and topic first to make sure you can easily look back at which session it was. This will help you to organize the information you learn.
Read the daily conference newspaper for a summary of conference highlights. Visit key websites covering the conference (eg, www.kaisernetwork.org for science or www.HDnet.org for a more community focus) and attend the Rapporteur Summaries at the Closing Session.
In addition to presentations, many organizations publish books, CD-ROMs and pamphlets on specific topics and hand them out for free. There will also be many brochures, educational material, buttons, posters, T-shirts and other conference material available.
Consider packing an extra bag or suitcase to fill with the material you plan to take home. Alternatively, whenever possible, ask people to post copies to you.
The conference is about networking as well as collecting information. Bring business cards with you to give out to people you meet.
If you don’t have official business cards from your organization, make basic cards with a computer programme such as Word. If you use Word “Help” and type in “business cards” you should get results including templates that you can download off the Internet.
When you collect other people’s cards, take a moment to write a few notes on the back to remind yourself of where you met and what you talked about.