The typical panel at a general political science conference goes something like this.

1. Each presenter talks. No questions or discussion. The begins audience to lose interest.
2. The discussant talks for a minute or two about the general themes of the panel, trying in vain to connect the unrelated papers. The audience is not aroused.
3. The discussant directs a series of technical suggestions to each presenter, boring the audience to sleep.
4. Now the bored, sleeping audience is asked to discuss the papers.

It doesn't have to be that way. A recent "series of unfortunate events" imposed a different structure on a panel I attended and it worked much better.

I rolled out of bed early on Friday morning in Orlando to attend a panel out of my field because my friends Jacob Ausderan and Nick Nicoletti were presenting. I expected their presentations to be good and I expected to be able to offer some valuable feedback.

By a series of seeming accidents, the panel was quite a bit different than planned.

• At least one person missed the panel, leaving only three presenters.
• The discussant had an emergency and couldn't make it, so he provided written comments rather than verbal.
• I accidentally instituted a norm of discussing each paper after the immediately presentation. (I just wanted to see a graph before Jacob exited his slideshow.)

At a consequence, the panel had the following form:

1. Each presenter gave a presentation, then controlled a brief discussion session.
2. There was no feeble attempt to connect the papers, except when it came up naturally in the discussion.
3. There were no technical suggestions given needlessly to the audience. These were e-mailed to the presenters instead.

This had a very positive impact on the quality of panel and the discussion.

• Each presenter got thirty minutes for presenting and discussing. The longer they presented, the shorter we discussed, giving an incentive to keep things brief.
• The presenters controlled the discussion. It helps the flow to have a person standing at the front of the room to direct the question toward.
• The presenters got lots of questions. Somehow questions that seem relevant at the end of a talk seem stale after other presentations and discussants' comments. The discussions still had plenty of momentum when they had to be cut off for time's sake.
• There were no discussant comments. While these are helpful to the presenters, they are usually boring to the audience. Saving this time for discussion made the panel much more pleasant.