How to run effective paper reading groups
Every year, I offer a distributed systems reading group seminar, where we discuss recent interesting research papers. ( Here is the list of papers we covered this Spring. ) Reading group seminars are a lot of fun when everything clicks. But they can easily turn into soul-draining boring meetings when a couple of things go wrong. Here are some common bad meeting patterns: (1) the presenter goes on and on with a dry presentation, (2) without a common background, the participants bombard the presenter with a lot of questions just to get the context of the work and a lot of time is wasted just to get started on the paper, (3) the audience drifts away (some fall into their laptop screens, some start to fiddle with their phones), and (4) in the discussion phase an awkward silence sets in and crickets chirp. I have been trying to tinker with the format of my reading group meetings to avoid those problems and improve the odds that everything clicks together. And over time I have been learn...
