Procedures for Organizing an Activity
Proposals for activities should be made using the online application form and submitted by January 1 of the year before the activity takes place If possible, a pre-proposal should be sent in December to director@ictp-saifr.org for comments before the final proposal is submitted. Every February, the Scientific Council meets to select activities for the following year. After the selection, we will confirm the accepted proposals and their event dates with the organizers.
The budget limit for two-week schools is approximately 160,000 Brazilian reais. Preferably, 70% of the budget should be allocated to students and 30% to lecturers. Budgets for other activities, such as Mini-Schools and Workshops, will depend on the activity details, such as number of participants expected, event duration, and names of confirmed speakers.
After the activity has been approved by the ICTP-SAIFR Scientific Council in February of the preceding year, the following schedule will be applied:
6.5 months before the activity, we will schedule a meeting with the event organizers, ICTP-SAIFR director and activities coordinator.
In this meeting, we will define the organization schedule and discuss details of the event. At this point, the organizers will be asked to send the main information about the event to the ICTP-SAIFR coordinator, which should contain:
- a brief description of the event, including its target audience;
- confirmation of the lecturers/speakers, their affiliations and contact information (if you do not yet have all of them confirmed, you may send a list of invited speakers);
- which questions should be included in the application form for your event. By default, all Schools request a motivation letter, a recommendation letter and the possibility of submitting an abstract for poster presentation (the possibility of short talk presentations is also welcome). For workshops, motivation and recommendation letters are usually not mandatory, but poster sessions are always important, as it is requested by many funding institutions that might cover participants’ attendance.
- any particular needs or specific requirements of the activity (e.g., whether it will need extra rooms, specific software, etc)
- If you’d like any specific image to be used in the advertisement poster
With this information, we will prepare a poster for the event, which will be sent to research institutions around the world, and we will prepare the activity’s webpage and application form.
We will then start organizing the travel arrangements and accommodation for the lecturers, and we will also start advertising the event.
The application deadline for participation is usually 2 months prior to the activity for workshops and 3 months for Schools. By this point, the final list of confirmed speakers and the title of the talks/lectures should be already defined and advertised.
The applications will be submitted via sis, and the organizers will receive a specific login to access and evaluate the applications. Organizers should give a score for each application and can also suggest the type of financial assistance the applicant should receive. Within 10 days after the application deadline, the organizer should complete the evaluations and notify the ICTP-SAIFR activities coordinator. Please note that you do not need to wait until the deadline to evaluate the applications, as your organizer login will be sent beforehand and you can choose to evaluate the applications continuously during the application period (instructions here).
The ICTP-SAIFR team will consider the ranking and organizers’ suggestions to distribute the available budget accordingly. Before sending the acceptance letters, ICTP-SAIFR team will send the proposed distribution of financial assistance for organizers’ final consideration.
We will then send the acceptance message to all selected applicants and they will have 1 week to confirm their participation in the system using a link we will send in the acceptance letter by email. In case some of them do not confirm or decline, the organizer may be asked to choose others from a standby list. However, we usually suggest accepting more applicants than the expected number of participants (rather than immediately drawing from the waiting list), as activities usually have 10-15% absences of confirmed participants.
2.5 months before the School (or 1.5 month before the workshop), we will have a complete list of all participants, and we will organize travel arrangements and accommodations for those who have been accepted with financial support.
By one month prior to the event, the organizer should send:
- a schedule with the starting time of each lecture (ICTP-SAIFR has a schedule template, which you can request from the activities coordinator);
- the abstracts and/or reading materials for the lectures and/or talks;
- The selected abstracts approved for poster presentations and/or short talks/contributed talks.
This information will be on the event’s webpage. If the organizers want special arrangements, they should inform us as soon as possible.
After the event, we will send all participants who attended a certificate of attendance and of presentation when appropriate. We will also send 2 surveys: one for participants’ evaluation of the event and the other for the organizers’ evaluation of ICTP-SAIFR’s organization and structure. In this survey, we will also include a diversity report, which you will be asked to comment on. We kindly ask you to respond to this survey, as it is important for us to keep improving our events. The results of the survey completed by the participants will be sent to the organizers 2 weeks after the event and will be posted on the event webpage.
All in all, scientific organizers are mainly responsible for the scientific management of the event, while ICTP-SAIFR is responsible for all the logistic organization and advertisements.
Any questions should be sent to ICTP-SAIFR activities coordinator (Bruna: bruna@ictp-saif.org) or secretary (Humberto: secretary@ictp-saif.org). Other contact info can be found here.
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