What is a guest encounter?
A guest encounter is a 45 minute chat with one of our attending guests. There will be twelve attendees in the room so it is more intimate than a guest talk and you can ask the questions you like yourself as opposed to hearing them asked by an MC. There will also be coffee/tea and sometimes biscuits in the room too.


How do I get to go to a guest encounter?
There are two ways to win a seat in an encounter. You can either win from a raffle ticket, or win via an auction sheet.


How do the raffle tickets work?
Two places in each Guest Encounter will be raffled off. Tickets can be bought at the reg desk. The winners will be announced at the same time as the auction winners. There is no limit to the number of tickets you can buy or the number of Encounters or places you can win.


How do the auction sheets work?

Ten places in each Guest Encounter will the auctioned. This will work by bidding sheets being put up on the wall at the event. One sheet for each guest encounter. There is no limit to the number of Encounters you can win. If you have a winning bid on two sheets you will win both. Attendees bid by putting their badge number and their bid on the sheet. At a specific time, which will be stated on the sheet (say 1pm), the sheets come down and the highest 10 bids win. But everyone pays the value of the 10th winning bid. All bids are visible to people bidding later.


If I bid for an encounter how do I increase my bid?
You can come back and up your bid if you want. But if you want to up your bid you have to add a new one to the bottom of the list, DO NOT change or cross out your previous bid. That way we know the order that the bids were placed.


Can you explain the bidding process more?
How about an example. Let's say that this is how the bidding sheet looks:

REG NUMBER	BID
G10	£200
G19	£5 – IGNORED AS REBID BELOW
ST301	£10
G59	£10
S1	£7 – IGNORED AS REBID BELOW
G19	£7 – IGNORED AS REBID BELOW
G19	£10
ST23	£17
ST162	£9 – IGNORED AS REBID BELOW
S75	£31
ST197	£8 – IGNORED AS REBID BELOW
S96	£27
S97	£35
ST162	£20
ST197	£20
S1	£20

So once sorted into bid order (And ignoring previous bids from the same person) they look like this...
£200, £35, £31, £27, £20, £20, £20, £17, £10, £10, £10.

As the 10th highest bid is £10, all 8 people with a bid higher than £10 win, but only pay £10. Even the person that bid £200. As you will see 3 people have bid £10. But there are only 2 places left. So the first 2 people to bid £10 win. In this case ST301 and G59. This is the reason for re-adding your bid at the bottom and not just changing it. If G19 had just changed their bid on line 5 to £10 it would have appeared they were the first person to have bid £10 (i.e. before both ST301 and G59), where as in fact they were the last person to bid £10.