Organizing workshops is a great way to form an academic community, but many people don’t know where to start. As with many things in academia, there is a hidden set of steps that are generally expected in a workshop proposal. I hope to make these steps a little clearer to make the process less daunting.

A workshop proposal generally consists of the following action items:

  • A topic for the workshop
  • A list of organizers
  • A proposed schedule for the workshop
  • A list of confirmed speakers / panelists
  • A plan to Encourage Participation
  • A website

A topic for the workshop

The topic is one of the most important things about a workshop. It is the motivation for people to assemble around a common cause. The topic should be narrow enough to be differentiable from the conference, but not so narrow that the workshop is relevant to only one person.

A good place to check example workshop topics is from previous offerings from the conference that you are planning to submit to. Often there will be workshops that are hosted for multiple conscutive years, which can often be a good place to start. If you find a longstanding workshop that you have previously attended, it can be a good idea to reach out to the previous years’ organizers to see if you can be involved (the worst thing they can say is no, in which case you can just follow the rest of this guide).

A list of organizers

Workshops are usually put on by a small team of people. In my experience, usually 4-8. To select a team of people, you can reach out to PhD students or Postdocs that do research related to the topic that you want to write a proposal about. When assembling this team of people, you want to try to have various perspectives across these traits: specific research interests, geographic location (typically at the granularity of continent), genders, ethnicities, industry/academia affiliation, and seniorities. Typically, other organizers that are PhD students will include their advisor to help with the submission. The role of advisors is to help you contact potential speakers.

A proposed schedule for the workshop

One of the first steps of a workshop is deciding if you will have a half-day (4 hours) or a full-day (8 hours) workshop. Both kinds of workshops typically follow a similar block-like structure consisting of the following types of events:

  • Keynote Speaker (25–45 minutes)
  • Paper Presentations (30–60 minutes)
  • Poster Session (60–90 minutes)
  • Panel Discussion (45–60 minutes)
  • Group Discussion (30–45 minutes)
  • Opening/Closing remarks (5–10 minutes)

Periodically, there will also be 30-minute coffee breaks for people to stretch their legs. These are often set by the conference, and they will typically split the workshop time into a few “chunks” to fill. The first and last 5–10 minutes will be opening and closing remarks where the organizers describe the goals of the workshop and summarize the workshop, respectively.

While there is some flexibility with how these “chunks” are ordered, they will almost always include at least 4 keynotes, but often 6–8. Most workshops also accept papers as early works from students to get feedback. These papers are typically presented as either a paper presentation or a poster session. Paper presentations are better for intimate venues, and poster sessions are better if you expect many submissions. For very large workshops, there is a poster session with “spotlight” paper presentations of the highest quality papers that were submitted.

Panel discussions and group discussions have a similar structure. The panel discussion typically involves invited speakers, whereas the group discussion allows everyone in the workshop to participate and share thoughts. Both discussions require prepared questions to discuss or “debate” questions related to the workshops topic. Usually there is one of these kinds of discussions.

In general, it is best to stick to the prescribed workshop structure, unless there is a very good reason to try something experimental. As with many things subject to peer review, being too expermental can negatively impact reviews and reduce the chance of acceptance.

A list of confirmed speakers / panelists

It is very important to have confirmed speakers for the submission. Some conferences will ask for screenshots of the email confirmations of the proposed speakers. As with assembling the team of organizers, it is good to have various perspectives for the speakers across the same dimesions (e.g., specific research interests, geographic location, genders, ethnicities, industry/academia affiliation, and seniorities). The main purpose of workshops is to give a venue for faculty to share their work. Typically the speakers will skew more junior, and it is good to have at least 1–2 faculty that are quite popular in the context of the conference. This both increases the chances of acceptance and also the likelihood that people will select your workshop over other workshops offered at the conference.

The easiest way to reach out to faculty is to use a template that you customize. Here is an example:

Subject: Invitation for a Keynote at <conference> Workshop on <topic>
---
Hi <professor name>,

I hope you're doing well! <optionally add some personal reference you have with the speaker, e.g., something you previously discussed with them>

I am a <PhD student at XYZ University> working with <advisors>. I am reaching out because we are planning to submit a workshop proposal on <name of workshop> to <conference> in <location>. You can find the tentative abstract for this edition at the end of this email.

We would love to invite you to give a <30-minute in-person keynote> at our workshop. Your expertise in <their topic specifically> would be a very important perspective to include in our workshop. We would be honored to have you share your insights and research with the attendees!

If you are interested, please let us know about your availability and commitments by responding to these points:

<whatever information you need from them>

Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes on behalf of the organizers,
<your name>

If you don’t hear back from the speaker, you can ask your advisor to send out an email. It is good to send out the emails to recruit speakers at least 2-3 weeks before the proposal is due so that there is enough time to select alternative speakers if the original speakers are not available or don’t respond.

A plan to encourage participation

Encouraging participation is important to get more poeple to attend your workshop, and thus develop a more connected community of researchers. In this way, workshops can be a bit like throwing a party. You want to make sure you get the word out so that people have a good time.

To do this, it is important to send emails out to relevant mailing lists. Some examples of email lists are robotics-worldwide, hri-announcements, or chi-announcements. There are also many affinity groups like Queer in AI / Queer in Robotics, Black in Robotics, LatinX in AI and many others. If you don’t know what email lists or affinity groups are out there, asking your labmates or peers can be a great way to connect with new people in your local community.

Once you have targeted a list, you can craft a call for participation (CfP) and send out emails to the list after the workshop is accepted and before the conference. You can copy an existing CfP (and you will receive many CfPs when you join these lists), but you don’t usually need to have one set to submit your workshop, just a plan for where it will go.

A website

In my experience, most workshops don’t explicity require a website, but having one up is sort of a hidden requirement. Don’t worry though! Creating a website is now easier than ever. Simply use Google Sites. The interface is very intuitive and is excellent for one-off websites like workshop websites. On this website, you will essentially lay out visually the components of the workshop:

  • Topic / Title
  • Conference / Location
  • Abstract explaining why it is important
  • Topics of Discussion (a bulleted list of topics that align with the workshop)
  • Proposed Schedule
  • Confirmed Speakers
  • Workshop Organizers

If you find google sites to be too restrictive, you can also fork other repositories and use those to create your website using GitHub Pages. I previously created a workshop on this repo.

Submission

After you follow these steps, you will have a complete workshop proposal (of course you may need to add other specific items that the call for workshop proposals specifies). After you press the submit button, you are all set. The next step is to simply wait.

If your workshop is accepted, there are a few more steps to take. You will need to actually send out the CfP you mentioned earlier, coordinate with the speakers to make sure there are no scheduling conflicts, and set up a page to submit papers to the workshop (the typical options are CMT, OpenReview, EasyChair, or you can manually email the papers but other options are probably better).

If the workshop is not accepted, you won’t have any more work to do! You can always submit the idea to a different conference with some updates. Luckily you will have already done most of the work, and you can just reach out to new people.

Meta notes on organizing

One quality of a good leader is the ability to delegate. If you are leading the workshop submission, I have found it helpful to create roles and tasks and assign them to specific people. The roles that naturally emerge for workshops are: web chair (1 person), send out CfPs chair (1 person), set up the submission page chair (1 person), and coordinate with speakers chairs (1+ people). Assign specific due dates for tasks that are 3+ days from when they really need to be done and check back in with the task owner on the due date. The person leading the workshop should be prepared to fulfill any role that does not happen for any reason.