School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks: Feedback about first week

We were required to fill a feedback form, this is more or less what I wrote:

– What did you like best about the workshop?
— multidisciplinary approach!
— some of the greatest speakers in the world at the moment are here to give their vision and advice and suggestions. In general, they are very friendly, helpful and interested in our research.
— we received a lot of stimuli and inputs.
— the school was free. this was great, otherwise I could have not participated. moreover, the fact that there were scholarships for researchers coming from not-so-rich countries was great since it allowed to have a multi-contries setting, something that is never achievable at conferences.

– What could be improved?
— there were too few sociologists, especially among students but also among lecturers. Of course it can be the case that sociologists were not aware of the school or that they were not interested. Either cases, it would be better for next year to have more of them.
— we should have had a list of bibliography to read before coming (not everyone is a physicists! I’m not). Surely we should have at least a list of concepts that lecturers were going to give as granted (such as mean field theory) before coming here.
— it would have been great to have the slides published on the web before the lectures. Anyway, I understand that most of the times the speakers are going to prepare slides just the night before and this is not a problem. What was not very good is that the slides were not put on the web even after the lecture, this prevented us from reading them and maybe ask questions or fix concepts or check bibliography.

-Other possible improuvements:
— it would be great to have plugs and wireless access everywhere (also in the lecture rooms).
— i guess that some private sponsors (showing off their products or having their logo exposed) could be willing to cover part of the expenses.
— a mailing list (with all the students and lecturers subscribed by default) should be activated some weeks before the school and animated from the beginning by at least one lecturer or organizer. It would be even better to set up a community site with all the photos and profile of participants (built with plone.org or mamboserver.com or some wiki engine).
— from a technical point of view, I would suggest to give much much more emphasis to *directed weighted* networks, but I guess next year they will be more studied anyway and this will mean that they will be more covered anyway.

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