Participants tend to arrive on Monday afternoon and evening, and sessions begin early on Tuesday morning. It has become a well received tradition to have a welcome party at some time on Monday late afternoon/evening. Typically, there may be a formal reception before dinner on Tuesday evening. Half or all of Wednesday or Thursday afternoon may be devoted to laboratory visits or an outing. On Thursday evening there is a Conference dinner. On Monday at about 17.00 and on Friday at lunch time, a separate room for EGAS Board meetings is needed; the Board discusses its business over a simple lunch, often sandwiches and beer. At some time in between these Board meetings, a period of a least an hour must be set aside for the General Assembly. To ensure a high attendance, it has been found useful to have this immediately following a plenary session on Wednesday or Thursday. At the Assembly, new Board members are elected, and the Board seeks direction from the EGAS membership on various issues. Thus, when the new Board meets at Friday lunch time, it can discuss its affairs taking into account the opinions of the General Assembly.

The placing of the invited papers through the week is a matter for the local Committee; however, it is a good idea to have a really popular speaker on Friday afternoon to retard the evaporation of participants.

In the light of the above, when the local Committee has copies of the abstracts, and knows which are to be presented orally and which by posters, it draws up a scientific programme as follows. First, it allows for the time needed for Poster Sessions, any Symposium, General Assembly, and Invited Speakers to find how much time is available for oral contributed papers. It the deploys this time by (a) allocating most of the papers to parallel sessions, each session having the same theme as far as possible (b) using up whatever time remains by making a selection of papers to be presented in plenary sessions.