MicroCon
In the car on the way from WisCon to Chicago on Monday, someone pulled out the WisCon pocket guide (which lists all the panels from the con), and suggested that we have our own little con in the car, covering each of the panel topics in turn.
I suggested a more specific variant: Five minutes per topic. We didn't actually do that, but I was tickled by the idea.
I think it might even be a fun party game—put a bunch of panel topics in a hat, pick one randomly, start the timer, spend five minutes discussing the topic, then on to the next one. Fine to skip a topic that nobody present knows much about, or if you're playing silly instead of serious, to take a topic you don't know about as an opportunity to make stuff up.
I realize there are many important panel topics that aren't really amenable to such a treatment; it's not a format for long deep discussion. Probably the five-minutes idea isn't a good one if you want actual serious conversation.
But the non-time-limited version we did in the car worked pretty well. We only went through a few panels, and we didn't cover anything in nearly the depth that a real panel would, but it was fun and interesting.
