CBTE

2027 CBTE Gathering Schedule

We want this gathering to be different than your typical conference experience. You will not find yourself running to the next session, having no time for discussion, or feeling like you’ve been hit by a firehose. We want you to rest, refresh, and reflect. We want you to ask great questions, engage in stimulating conversations, and ponder new ideas. Hence, we have designed our time together to allow for content delivery, group discussions, questions, and “unconference” sessions.

Unconference sessions are participant-oriented meetings where the attendees decide on the agenda, discussion topics, workshops. An informal and flexible schedule allows participants to suggest topics of their own interest and choose sessions accordingly. It provides an opportunity for people from diverse disciplines to work collaboratively on topics of common interest. The overarching goal is to prioritize conversation over presentation. In other words, the content for a session does not come from a select number of individuals planning the event, but is generated by all the attendees within the room, and, as such, every participant has an important role.¹ At our 2025 gathering we dedicated a full afternoon to the unconference format. It was so successful that we plan to do it two afternoons at the 2027 gathering.

Following is our preliminary agenda. The start and end dates and times are fixed, but expect updates to the details as we get closer to the event itself. On the registration form, we ask participants what they hope to learn, and then adapt the schedule to accommodate emerging themes and questions.

Sources
[1]Budd, A., Dinkel, H., Corpas, M., Fuller, J. C., Rubinat, L., Devos, D. P., Khoueiry, P. H., Förstner, K. U., Georgatos, F., Rowland, F., Sharan, M., Binder, J. X., Grace, T., Traphagen, K., Gristwood, A., & Wood, N. T. (2015). Ten simple rules for organizing an unconference. PLoS computational biology, 11(1), e1003905. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003905