Event day: what to set up before doors open

One hour before doors

Open the second screen first. The big screen is a separate window that you drag onto the projector or onto the hall's TV. Do it while the room is still empty. Windows sometimes decides to mirror the display instead of extending it, and the two minutes it takes to fix that are two minutes you will not have once 150 people are standing in the room.

Run the sound at the volume a full room needs, not an empty one. Bodies absorb sound. The cue that carries at 8:00 a.m. disappears at 8:30 with a hundred people talking. The software plays audio cues you choose per event: round start, a fifteen second warning, table change, break and close. Each one is a sound file, so a recorded voice works as well as a chime. Test them through the house system, not through the laptop speakers.

Print the badges with the participant number on them. When the screen says that table 4 moves to table 9, nobody reads a company name. They read a number, and they read it from three meters away.

Hand out the personal schedules on paper. One sheet per attendee, listing every 1-to-1 meeting in order. Paper does not run out of battery and does not need the venue's Wi-Fi, which is the same reason the software itself runs offline all day.

Mark no-shows before round one

Your check-in desk always knows more than your registration list. Mark everyone who did not show up, then recalculate before you start.

The recalculation has two modes. Minimal adjustment is the default: it keeps as much of the schedule as it can and only fixes the tables the absences broke. Full reoptimization rebuilds the remaining rounds from scratch and usually produces better matches, at the cost of a schedule that no longer resembles the one you printed. Rounds already played are never touched in either mode.

Balanced tables are worth more than the schedule you printed last night. Print the updated personal schedules or read the assignments off the screen, but do not run the room from an obsolete sheet.

Latecomers

Anyone arriving after the first round starts enters at the next one. The system seats the person where no repeat meeting occurs. If there is no seat that avoids a repeat, it tells you instead of seating them quietly and letting two people discover for themselves that they already met.

Running the rounds

The operating screen carries the whole event: start and pause, previous and next round, restart the timer, jump to a specific round, automatic advance, volume, and keyboard shortcuts for all of it. The timer counts each speaking turn, the gap between turns, and the table change.

Pausing is legitimate. If catering is late or a sponsor wants the microphone, pause. The clock stops and the schedule survives intact.

Keep the table overview open on a second monitor if you have one. It goes full screen with F11 and lets you step through rounds while the current one is running, which is how you spot a table that has emptied out.

The software scans the room as you go and flags what needs a decision: a table down to one person, an anchor who has not arrived, a meeting that should not have happened. It suggests a fix; you approve it.

Log occurrences as they happen. Each entry is stamped with the time and the round, and that record is what settles questions two weeks later.

If the machine crashes, reopen the program. Session state is written every five seconds, so you resume at the round you were in.

Before teardown

Generate the backup and the reports while the room is still yours. The backup file carries the database and the audio files together. The reports cover attendance, meetings planned against meetings actually held, average compatibility, repeats, and table utilization, and they export to PDF and Excel.

It takes under a minute, and it is what lets you answer, on Monday, exactly how many 1-to-1 meetings happened and between which companies.