In the weeks leading up to the conference you enter the meetings you want to have, and block off your dinner date. Then at 1am on the morning of the conference the schedules are all set. You are correct that this does not work well if you want to schedule new meetings after the sorting hat has done its thing.
This piqued my curiosity, so I looked into it — it seems that there’s a pretty equal split between pre-conference meetings scheduled (2449) and during-conference meetings scheduled (2039), with meeting confirmation frequency peaking on the Friday of the event. This is just EA Global: Boston 2023 data and I haven’t looked at the others — but it does indicate to me that we don’t want to set up systems that favour one type of user and disadvantaging another.
In the weeks leading up to the conference you enter the meetings you want to have, and block off your dinner date. Then at 1am on the morning of the conference the schedules are all set. You are correct that this does not work well if you want to schedule new meetings after the sorting hat has done its thing.
I don’t know what the statistics are, but personally when I went to conferences most of my meetings were set after the conference had already started.
This piqued my curiosity, so I looked into it — it seems that there’s a pretty equal split between pre-conference meetings scheduled (2449) and during-conference meetings scheduled (2039), with meeting confirmation frequency peaking on the Friday of the event. This is just EA Global: Boston 2023 data and I haven’t looked at the others — but it does indicate to me that we don’t want to set up systems that favour one type of user and disadvantaging another.