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Presenter guide · Works in progress

Sharing Work in Progress with EDM Megalab

The short version

Bring the work as it is, not as you think a formal talk ought to look. Preliminary ideas, puzzling results, half-built models, design forks, one troublesome figure, and analyses that did not work are all welcome. You do not need a complete story or beautiful slides.

What does help is a clear purpose. A useful WIP is prepared, not polished: give EDM Megalab enough context to think with you, and identify one to three questions or goals that will make the conversation useful.

What a WIP is for

A WIP is a working session, not a performance or an exam. Its purpose is to make the science better while there is still time to change it. Presenting early is often especially valuable: advice about a design, analysis, or model can have much more impact before the next step is locked in.

Good reasons to present include:

The work can be at any stage. It only needs to be developed enough that EDM Megalab has something concrete to discuss.

Start with the help you want

Before making slides, finish this sentence:

By the end of this session, I would like to have a clearer answer about...

Then turn that goal into one to three focal questions. Questions that name a decision, uncertainty, or tradeoff tend to produce more useful feedback than an open-ended request for general thoughts.

Instead of only asking...Give EDM Megalab a focal question such as...
“What do you think?”“Which of these two task designs better separates learning from choice variability, and what would each fail to identify?”
“Does the model look okay?”“Are the state and trait components identifiable with this sampling schedule? What recovery check would be most informative?”
“Any ideas about this result?”“What plausible artifact or alternative explanation should we rule out before interpreting this effect?”
“Is the project ready?”“What is the highest-risk unresolved decision before we preregister and begin data collection?”
“How are my slides?”“After this short explanation, can you state the main claim in one sentence? Which figure or transition obscured it?”

It is also helpful to say what is open for discussion, what is alreadyfixed, and what is outside the scope of this session. That keeps the discussion from spending twenty minutes redesigning a part of the project that cannot change.

Send a short agenda note

When arranging the session, send the coordinator a short note that can be used to build and circulate the meeting agenda. It can be brief and informal:

Working title:
Project stage:
One-sentence scientific question:
What I want from the session (1-3 focal questions or goals):
What I plan to show:
Discussion preference (interruptions welcome, clarifications only, or hold
  questions until a stopping point):
Useful expertise to have in the room:
Any confidentiality or sharing constraints:

This lets the coordinator allocate time, combine WIPs thoughtfully, invite people with relevant expertise, and keep the discussion centered on the presenter's goals. If the session contains more than one WIP, the agenda should state the time available to each presenter and protect a discussion block for each project.

Prepare only what the discussion needs

There is no required slide count or deck structure. You can use rough slides, a whiteboard, a notebook, a design diagram, a live analysis, a handout, or a single figure. Aesthetics are optional; legibility is not. Label axes, define unfamiliar terms, and give a cross-lab audience enough orientation to take part.

A simple WIP often needs only:

  1. The question and the ask. What are you studying, and where do you want help from EDM Megalab?
  2. Just enough context. What does EDM Megalab need to know to reason about the decision? Skip the exhaustive literature review.
  3. The current state of the work. Show the design, data, code, result, or competing options honestly. Label preliminary results as preliminary.
  4. The decision space. What alternatives have you considered? What are their tradeoffs or constraints?
  5. The focal questions again. Put them back on the screen when discussion begins.

For a full 90-minute WIP session, a useful default is roughly 20–30 minutes of framing and 40–50 minutes of discussion, with a little room for introductions, transitions, and a closing summary. If two projects share a meeting, the coordinator and presenters should scale this together. The underlying principle is more important than the exact numbers: stop presenting while there is still ample time to work on the questions.

If the project is complicated, consider sharing one figure, diagram, abstract, or short note in advance. Pre-reading should be helpful rather than a hidden admission requirement; the session should still make sense to someone who did not read it.

Open by making the contract clear

At the beginning, tell the room how to help. For example:

This is an early pilot, and the main thing I need today is help deciding whether the next version should use a within- or between-person manipulation. I will give about ten minutes of context, show the tradeoffs I see, and then pause. Clarifying questions are welcome as I go; could we hold broader design alternatives until that pause?

You are allowed to redirect the conversation. “That is an important issue, but it is fixed for this dataset; could we return to the model-comparison question?” is good facilitation, not defensiveness.

You also do not need an immediate answer to every question or a defense of every preliminary choice. “I do not know,” “that is exactly the uncertainty I wanted help with,” and “let me think about that after the meeting” are all perfectly good WIP responses.

Make feedback a shared responsibility

A low-polish WIP format works only when the room is constructive. Audience members should:

Critical feedback is welcome and often the point. “Constructive” does not mean avoiding disagreement; it means making disagreement specific, respectful, and useful. When possible, pair a concern with a diagnostic, alternative, or next step.

The facilitator or coordinator should briefly restate the presenter's goals, watch the agenda and the clock, bring the discussion back when it drifts, invite voices that have not yet entered, and reserve a few minutes to summarize. A volunteer note-taker can be extremely helpful: the presenter is then free to listen and think instead of trying to capture every comment.

End with a short harvest

Use the last few minutes to ask:

Afterward, the presenter decides what to use. Feedback is input, not a vote or a list of required revisions. Review the notes while the conversation is fresh, record the suggestions you want to pursue, and keep track of why you set others aside. Follow up individually when a contribution opens a useful technical question or collaboration.

A final reassurance

Please do not postpone a WIP because the slides are not attractive, the results are messy, or the story has not come together. Those may be signs that this is exactly the right time to present. The courtesy you owe others is not visual polish; it is a focused agenda, honest context, and enough time for discussion.

Sources and examples from other research communities

This guide adapts several practices used elsewhere: