2.1.

Organization of the event

The event is open to the public and registration is free, with event costs covered entirely through sponsorship. The organizers invite keynote speakers in the local ecosystem to present on topics covering business strategies, personal career reflections, and technical areas. Dedicated poster sessions are offered to research students to present their research work, with both French and English contributions accepted. The submission process is minimalist, requiring contact details, affiliation, and a 100-word abstract. Work already presented at other conferences in the year preceding the conference is accepted; in 2022 and 2023, since this metric has been tracked, on average 50% of posters were presented for the first time at this event. To further incentivize submissions, cash prizes are offered for eligible contributions. A jury of local photonics experts is invited to be judges at the event, with a target that each judge will review 3-4 posters. The event budget covers catering, prizes and marketing items. The budget increase has been driven by the catering required for a growing number of participants, representing approximately 70% of costs since 2022. Venues have been accessible with no fee due to collaboration with local universities, with the exception of a fee to access the online platform Remo in 2020¹⁰ A summary of the event’s history is presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Summary of the history of the Montréal Photonics Networking Event.

The organization committee is composed of student representatives from universities with photonics research, co-chairs from academia and industry, as well as a representative from the province’s industry photonics cluster, Optonique. The Authors of this proceeding were members of the 2023 committee; all officers are named in the Acknowledgements section. The expectations are to participate in bi-monthly online organization meetings and attend the event in person. Supplementary tasks include nominating keynote speakers and judges, fundraising, and promoting the event to students within each individual networks. Beyond the university network, partnerships have been developed with local stakeholders involved in the development of graduate students. Funding is raised in the form of grants and sponsorships from professional organizations and student chapters (IEEE Montréal, IEEE Photonics Society, Optica, SPIE), provincial research consortiums (COPL, INTRIQ, STARaCOM, RQMP), and private and non-profit partners (DataFranca, Ansys, PreFab AI Photonics, Keysight Technologies, Excelitas Technologies, Fonex, Optonique, Numana, PRIMA Québec).

2.2.

Program overview and engagement of attendees

An overview of the program for the Montréal Photonics Networking Event is listed in Figure 1 (a). As a guideline, each session has a duration of 45 to 60 minutes to maximize and vary the nature of the audience’s engagement. The event duration was one half-day (4-5 hours) from 2016-21, with an increase to a full day (6-7 hours) in 2022-23 in response to participant and committee feedback to have more time to attend the poster session. In the transition from in-person (before 2019) to online events (2020, 2021), the organization committee engaged in a design process to engineer the interaction of the participants; the reader is referred to previous work for considerations to optimize interactions between researchers, with the poster presentations, and the audience¹⁰. Figure 1 (b) highlights the resulting trend of increased participant interaction time through poster sessions, free networking and structured “speed” networking events, with a significant reduction in the plenary presentations from early editions. The increase of participatory events was accentuated in 2022 with a return to an on-site event. The current format of the edition has a balanced time of engagement for free networking, structured networking, poster presentations, and plenary presentations.

Figure 1.

(a) Overview of the event program. (b) Evolution of the time allocated to individual program items for the event. *A morning poster session was introduced at the 2022 event.

The organization of the poster session is as follows. Judges are allocated 3-4 posters to review and encouraged to spend 7-10 minutes with the researcher, who will present the poster and answer questions to assist in the judging. For each presentation, the judges are asked to score the quality of the presentation on a Likert scale of 1 to 5 using the rubric shown in Table 2 (a). A committee award is judged using the same rubric as Table 2 (a), with an additional criterion for the demonstration or potential for collaboration with the ecosystem in Montréal. A people’s choice award is also available, and each attendee is permitted to cast one vote for their favourite presentation. For the speed networking event, participants are organized in pairs and asked to present their research work in 60 seconds each. Participants rotate 7-10 times in a session, meeting different people in each rotation cycle. Participants grade each other following the rubric in Table 2 (b) All of the grading is entered with an online form (Google Forms), which allowed to rapidly collect and process results. In the context of the 2023 speed networking event, close to 500 responses were collected in a 1-hour session.

Table 2.

Rubrics for judged events: (a) poster session, and (b) speed networking session.

2.3.

Marketing and community-building

The marketing costs associated with the event are approximately 10% of the total cost and can be inferred from amounts listed in Table 1; these costs are limited to stationary items (name badges, certificates of appreciation, signage, etc.) The outreach effort is mainly based on in-kind and volunteer efforts to raise the profile of the event: the importance of the committee members cannot be understated in the recruitment of research presenters, attendees, judges, funders, and speakers. Event communication is done via email through each institutions’ representative, allowing for organic growth of participants. Partnerships with professional networks (IEEE, Optica, SPIE, Optonique, COPL, etc.) have been important for further impressions of the event; these, however, cannot readily be quantified because of the lack of resources to assess marketing metrics.

In August 2023, the creation of a LinkedIn Page “Montreal Photonics Networking” and a logo served to centralize the visibility and communications on social media. In the three months leading up to the 2023 event, 18,660 impressions were counted, compared to 5,000 impressions in a similar period for previous events¹⁰. The page has grown to over 1,100 followers as of August 2024, with 45% from the Greater Montréal Metropolitan Region. The LinkedIn page content, which was initially event oriented, evolved to ad hoc and rapid dissemination of news and events linked to the geographic network. A regular feature is the publication each term of education opportunities for photonics, such as the photonics course list document shown in Figure 2 (b), available to all graduate students in Montréal via the provincial university cooperation office. Content related to the 2024 event will be published in a period of 5 months surrounding the event, i.e. September 2024 to January 2025.

Figure 2.

(a) The Montreal Photonics Networking logo was created in 2023. Credit Dr. M. Rilling. (b) Excerpt of graduate photonics courses in Montréal for the Fall 2023 session.

3.1.

Lessons learned

A selection of qualitative feedback is recorded in Table 3 in relation to the program outline of Figure 1 (a). The reader is advised to treat these as practical guidelines, which ought to be adapted to reflect their own situation for efficiently engaging graduate research students in collaborative environments. It is left as an exercise for the reader to consider how to transfer the lessons learned from online and on-site events, with the intention to creating an inclusive space.

Table 3.

Qualitative feedback from the 2020-2023 event organization committees.

3.2.

Future perspectives

The Montréal Photonics Networking Event provides insights into the leadership and opportunities in the photonics industry. The organization of such an event requires substantial effort, but having a large, collaborative team makes a significant difference. To further facilitate this process, the organization committee is consolidating agreements with Optonique, the Québec Photonics Industry Cluster, and its’ sister research cluster, the Centre Optique Photonique et Laser (COPL), to offer administrative and financial support. Future partnerships will be necessary to continue cohesive engagement, which will enable stakeholders in the education, research, innovation, and industrial sectors to positively influence the graduate student experience as well as local and regional economic development.