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Dagstuhl Seminars

Information for Organizers

of Dagstuhl Seminars and Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops

Announcement Concerning the Pandemic

While we hope that the pandemic will have subsided enough to not affect your seminar, some things might still be different at Dagstuhl. For our infection prevention measures, see https://www.dagstuhl.de/coronavirus.

Now that your proposal for a Dagstuhl Seminar or Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop (both will in the following be denoted by "seminar" for short) has been accepted, our service team will keep track of all steps for a successful seminar preparation and will request all necessary materials from you as soon as reasonable. You can support our work by responding in time.

While most of the preparation is handled by Schloss Dagstuhl's team, directing the seminar itself is the responsibility of the organizers, as is the follow-up after. For that reason, Schloss Dagstuhl expects all members of the organizer team to attend and actively participate in the moderation of this seminar, thereby ensuring its success.

Contact: Seminars

For question about organizing Dagstuhl Seminars, contact:

Dr. Andreas Dolzmann

Contact Dagstuhl Seminars

Contact: Perspectives Workshops

For questions about organizing Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops, contact:

Dr. Marsha Kleinbauer

Contact Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops

Establishing Contact

One member of our service team will be your main contact during seminar preparation and will get in touch with you by email soon after the seminar preparation process has started.

  • This email will contain your seminar number. We kindly ask to include this number in the subject of each email you send to us. Your seminar has its own seminar webpage available at https://www.dagstuhl.de/seminar_number.
  • We will ask you to send us a short one-page seminar description (also known as “motivation text”) outlining the specific goals and topics to be addressed during the seminar. This crucial text will accompany each invitation letter and will appear on the seminar webpage. Keep in mind that it often plays a major role in the acceptance decision of invitees. Schloss Dagstuhl will publish the seminar description under the CC-BY license "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International". Please mention in the email to us the authors of the text while simultaneously confirming your (and the other authors') agreement to the publication. We attach a .docx template for the seminar description. While using the template is preferred, feel free to alternatively send your text in any other common format.

Beside the administrative contact, one member of our Scientific Staff will be assigned to your seminar as well.

For Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops, the organisers are given the possibility to prolong their stay in order to work on the workshop's Dagstuhl Manifesto (cf. "Writing a Dagstuhl Manifesto" below) – if you want to make use of this opportunity, please let us know as soon as possible as we will have to reserve the rooms in our center.

Inviting the Participants

No earlier than 12 months prior to your seminar, we will start the invitation process. Depending on the booking situation, the maximum number of participants Dagstuhl ultimately approves for your seminar may deviate from the one mentioned in the letter. Due to the unpredictability of response rates, the invitation process stretches over several rounds until the approved seminar size is reached. Each invitation round consists of the following main steps:

  • We ask you to send a list of invitees in the same format as required for the list in the proposal. Note that organizers are not permitted to invite people to the seminar themselves, not even informally; the final decision on any invitations is made by Schloss Dagstuhl.
    • For the first round this list should be an updated version of the list submitted together with your proposal and, thus, we send you a syntactically checked version of that list for your convenience.
    • For further rounds (if they become necessary), an attempt should be made to replace those who have declined the invitation with individuals with a similar range of expertise and to keep the balance and diversity aimed for by Schloss Dagstuhl. To this end, we might include some hints when requesting the list.
  • Invitations are sent by Schloss Dagstuhl to all invitees by email. We handle the replies and administrative questions.  If adjustments to the list are deemed necessary, Schloss Dagstuhl will ask you to rework the list according to certain criteria. In rare cases, e.g., in cases of accepted applications for participation in a Dagstuhl Seminar or if members of Dagstuhl's boards want to participate, Schloss Dagstuhl will inform the organizers about Schloss Dagstuhl's decision to invite specific people in time to allow the organizers to raise well founded objections. We ask that organizers receiving any invitation acceptances or rejections forward them directly to us. Note that registration for participation in a Dagstuhl Seminar is only possible through the use of our online event registration system DOOR.
  • A few weeks before the end of the invitation round, Schloss Dagstuhl sends non-responding invitees a reminder.
  • In some cases, after the deadline has passed, we ask you to contact non-responding (key) participants for inviting them personally. Note that registration is possible even after the deadline has passed, but for the purpose of estimating participation numbers we usually assume that people will not register without prompting after the deadline.

Organizers can track the current status of responses using our invitee response website. It tracks the changing status of invitee responses, indicating who has accepted, declined, or simply not replied.

When we communicate the possibility of further invitations due to the availability of spaces, please keep in mind that this is just an offer. If the group of confirmed participants is already sufficient to fulfil the intended goals of the seminar, further invitations are not necessary just in order to make up for a perceived lack of numbers. Dagstuhl Seminars and Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops achieve and maintain their high standard by virtue of the quality of the group of participants. The results are not necessarily negatively impacted by virtue of a smaller number of participants.

Final Preparations before the Seminar

About 4–8 weeks before the seminar, the final preparation for the seminar is initiated from our side.

  • We will send some important information, mainly on traveling to and staying at Schloss Dagstuhl, to the participants. This email also lets participants know how to access further information and tools, e.g., the participant list, the materials page (where participants may upload seminar materials), and the seminar wiki – all of which will also be linked on the seminar webpage.
  • Separately, the Scientific Staff will contact you to draw your attention to some things to keep in mind when running a seminar and offer some advice for your final preparations as well as access to the seminar's mailing list.

From here on out, the organizers have a more proactive role as they are responsible for directing the seminar themselves. For example, this is a good point in time for your final preparations and to let the seminar participants know about your plans for the seminar.

  • We recommend that you upload a tentative schedule to the seminar's webpage before the seminar (cf. "Seminar Program" below).
  • You might want to consider asking seminar participants to upload materials related to their talk, working groups, and so on to the seminar's materials page accessible via the link "Shared Documents" on the seminar's webpage.
  • For more interactive preparations, a wiki page for the seminar is also linked on the seminar's webpage.

Arrival and Departure

Assuming the example of a five day seminar, the guests are expected to arrive at Schloss Dagstuhl on Sunday afternoon from 3pm. At least one of the organizers should arrive on Sunday afternoon. We have a separate page with information about arrival and check-in and a separate page on possible travel options to Dagstuhl.

On Monday morning, before the start of the first scheduled session, we request that the organizers come to the reception to clarify a few organizational issues.

We expect the participants to be present during the entire week as arriving and departing between Tuesday and Thursday has a substantial detrimental impact on the seminar itself and program planning. Guests normally leave Friday after lunch.

A final accounting is prepared together with the guests on the departure day, check-out should be done before 9am. Note that organizers have free room and board and only have to pay their additional expenses, if they had any. For more details, please refer to the Expenses section.

Seminar Program

The program is compiled by the organizers. However, from Dagstuhl's side, some times are fixed, especially the meals:

Breakfastbetween 7.30 am – 8.45 am
during this time, guests can freely choose when to partake		(Mon–Fri)dinner hall
Coffee and Teabetween 10 am – 11 am
the organizers choose concrete duration and start		(Mon–Fri)your seminar's
coffee-break areas
Lunch12.15 pm – 1 pm(Mon–Fri)dinner hall
Coffee and Cakebetween 3 pm – 4 pm
the organizers choose concrete duration and start		(Sun–Thu)dinner hall
Dinner6 pm(Mon–Thu)dinner hall
Self-service buffet from 6 pm (open end)(Sun)dinner hall

Assuming the example of a five day seminar, departure is planned after lunch on Friday. The seminar starts Monday morning at 9am, and Wednesday afternoon is typically used to go on a hike or an excursion in the surrounding area. Thus, there are five mornings (from Monday morning to Friday morning) and three afternoons available for a five day seminar per se.

Dagstuhl recommends to have a somewhat detailed schedule planned out in advance and to upload it on the seminar website as early as possible, and update it when it changes. Note that it is highly recommended to use that schedule only as a guideline and to change it dynamically to accommodate the evolving needs of the seminar. Often, seminars only finalize the schedule for the next day the evening before. Note that uploading the updated schedules to the seminar's website will help the participants to always refer to the latest version.

For designing your schedule, we can offer the following advice mainly based on observations made at past seminars here at Dagstuhl and on feedback gathered through surveys:

  • Do not cram too much into one day, in particular avoid sessions after dinner when people usually want time for personal interaction. In general, leave enough time for informal discussions.
  • Group work is an option to break through the typical conference format but is no panacea. Also, make sure to schedule an opportunity for the groups' results to be briefly presented in front of all seminar participants.
  • Ask participants to avoid conference-style talks. Instead, ask for open problems, current ideas and insights, or possible future developments.
  • Plan enough time for discussions and questions about the talks, which could alternatively also be grouped together for a whole session of talks with similar topics.
  • The first session could be used to let people briefly introduce themselves.
  • If several communities meet in your seminar, consider starting off with tutorials or overviews that help people to understand the other groups' views and terminology.

In case of a Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop, it would be helpful if you could discuss the contents of your Dagstuhl Manifesto (cf. "Writing a Dagstuhl Manifesto" below) already during your workshop.

Hiking/Outing

Wednesday afternoon is traditionally reserved for a hike into the nearby woods or an excursion. A group activity of this type affords the participants to become acquainted with one another in an informal situation, plus offers them the opportunity of getting some exercise. Please contact the Dagstuhl team for advice and maps (unfortunately the team is not available as guides). The team can also help with booking a bus or similar things. Please keep in mind that a bus, entrance fees, and similar costs usually have to be paid in cash.

The Seminar on Site

Information about the available equipment, meals, and services (even things like childcare if really necessary for enabling attendance) can be found on a separate webpage.

To highlight a few details that have a direct impact on your duties as organizers:

  • Please ensure punctuality for meals.
  • You do our kitchen team a great favor by helping to clear the tables after meals. Carts are available for your convenience for collecting dirty dishes.
  • For lunch and dinner, there are place cards. Note that she seating of the participants changes at every meal. This is intended to seat people together who are not yet (well) acquainted with one another.
  • Make sure people wear their nametags. (Be advised that magnetic ones are sold at the reception.)
  • We attach considerable importance to the outside doors not being left open, and that only the individuals personally invited by us are present.
  • You will find an abstract book in the center in which all the participants of our seminars enter a handwritten summary of their presentation. This enables each guest to leave behind his or her own personal mark in the history of Schloss Dagstuhl.
  • Furthermore, you can design a page for your seminar in the Visitors’ Book to be found on the kiosk next to the cafeteria. Please ask participants to sign it.
  • Make an appointment for taking the seminar's group picture with the reception.
  • We kindly ask that you and all seminar participants fill out our survey, designed to help us improve the quality of our service and collect feedback instrumental in ensuring our funding. The link to the survey website will be distributed by e-mail towards the end of the week. For those who prefer to fill out a printed version, the survey will also be available in paper form. Approximately 1–2 weeks after the seminar has ended, all attendees receive an anonymous summary of survey results.
  • Please consider appointing a so-called collector (typically a young researcher) at the beginning of the seminar. Collecting the abstracts for the seminar's required Dagstuhl Report (cf. "Documentation of the Seminar: Dagstuhl Reports" below) entails making contact with all contributors, and thus is an excellent opportunity to, well, make contacts.

A member of our Scientific Staff will visit your seminar on one day to meet you, discuss organizational issues, and answer your questions.

Documentation of the Seminar: Dagstuhl Reports

The financial support given to the seminars requires a documentation as part of Schloss Dagstuhl's quality assurance activities.

Thus, for each seminar a citable report is published in the periodical Dagstuhl Reports, which is published under a Creative Commons license and is based on the OpenAccess principle, i.e., the articles are accessible online and free of charge. The seminar report should include

  • an executive summary of the seminar program and the fundamental results,
  • an overview of the talks given during the seminar (summarized as talk abstracts), and
  • if applicable, summaries (with results) from working groups.

Please familiarize yourself with the more detailed information on Dagstuhl Reports for organizers and don't forget to designate a collector. Also, shortly before the end of the seminar, you will receive an email containing guidelines for the publication process. Note that you will have approximately 8–12 weeks after the seminar to submit the final version for publication.

Additionally for Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops: Writing a Dagstuhl Manifesto

Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshops have to produce a Dagstuhl Manifesto for publication in our dblp-indexed Dagstuhl Manifestos series in addition to the Dagstuhl Report.

While the Dagstuhl Report documents the workshop, the Dagstuhl Manifesto's goal is to describe the state-of-the-art in a field along with its shortcomings and strengths. Based on this, position statements and perspectives for the future should be described. A manifesto typically has a less technical character; instead it provides guidelines and roadmaps for a sustainable organization of future progress.

Writing the Dagstuhl Manifesto is the responsibility of the workshop's organizers. It should be submitted to our publishing department no later than 24 weeks after the workshop. As stated above, starting the writing process already during the workshop is recommended.

Inform Dagstuhl about Results and add Acknowledgements

Schloss Dagstuhl needs your and your seminar's participants' help to document the impact your seminar has. So if you get any results that can be traced back to the seminar, please let Schloss Dagstuhl know about them, be they publications, projects, or even a new job and so on. Please ask the participants to likewise let Schloss Dagstuhl know about results.

If the result is a publication, we will be able to list it under the "Dagstuhl's Impact" section on the seminar's website, which might help other seminar participants to keep track of these results. Also, Schloss Dagstuhl would kindly ask you to acknowledge in the publication that the publication has in some way benefited from the seminar. You are free to word the acknowledgement however you like, but we would ask you to always include the seminar's title and seminar number as well as some kind of link to the seminar's website. Note that a seminar's website can be linked to using "https://www.dagstuhl.de/seminar_number" where "seminar_number" is replaced by the seminar's five-digit seminar number.
Nevertheless, as there have often been questions on how to word the acknowledgement, here are a few fictional example wordings for your inspiration:

  • This work has benefitted from Dagstuhl Seminar 22321 "Computation in Fractional-Dimensional Banach Spaces."
  • This work has benefitted substantially from Dagstuhl Seminar 22321 "Computation in Fractional-Dimensional Banach Spaces."
  • This work has benefitted from the second and fourth author's participation in Dagstuhl Seminar 22321 "Computation in Fractional-Dimensional Banach Spaces."
  • Part of this work was initiated by Dagstuhl Seminar 22321 "Computation in Fractional-Dimensional Banach Spaces."
  • We thank the organizers of Dagstuhl Seminar 22321 "Computation in Fractional-Dimensional Banach Spaces." for bringing us together. We are particularly indebted to seminar participant Jane Doe for asking a question that initiated our research.

While we rely on you and the seminar participants to be proactive in letting us know about outcomes, all attendees are asked to complete an additional survey, mainly for collecting scientific success stories based on their seminar attendance, approximately 1 year after the seminar.

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