[rectang]

I gave a long post at the top level about running a book-focused reading group at a company, but your group sounds more like a Papers We Love[1] chapter.

I used to co-host the San Diego chapter of Papers We Love[2], and here's my secret sauce: I offered to meet with every presenter in advance for a dry run of their presentation. Probably two thirds of the presenters took me up on the offer.

For the group and the presenter, going through a dry run had the positive impact you would expect on presentation quality.

The benefit for me was that I got one-on-one discussion/learning with a wide variety of people passionate about a broad range of papers, and I also got to go through the material twice. So I learned much more and retained it better.

[1] https://paperswelove.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYPNnoVAQqb2Mue9v9f2euA

[Foe]

The dry run idea is really smart. We've done something similar, where we had Niv Dayan[1] lead a session on Diva[2] (before it won Best Paper at VLDB 2025!). I had worked with him in the past and thought it would be cool to have him present to the group. Having the author in the room completely changed the quality of the discussion. Most of our sessions right now aren't presenter-led, but I'd like to do more of that.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vdMOvmIAAAAJ [2] https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p3923-eslami.pdf