While the details of registration and program setup may vary, the local organizers of a meeting establish the time when everyone is expected to be at the meeting and when the meeting adjourns.
There are no plenary or special or invited talks, only contributed presentations by volunteer speakers.
The aspiring speakers must be present at the beginning of the meeting. The order of the talks is determined randomly, and the talk length is determined by the total available time divided by the number of speakers. The presentations must be prepared in a flexible way so as to accommodate the time slot that will be assigned.
To encourage collegiality, various slapstick awards are given; we also maintain a book in which the speaker names are recorded and in which RAINy poems are written in.