In the first part, every participant is invited to suggest one or more questions, and to give a key word or phrase for each of them. A list of all questions is made.
Participants are then invited to present briefly their questions; it suffices to give a rough idea of what one is asking, and details can be postponed.
After all questions have been presented, a question is democratically selected from the list: each participant has two votes, and the question receiving the largest number of votes is selected. In case of a tie, a tie vote is made. The person who has suggested the question is from this point on designated as speaker
After a question has been selected, the discussion starts. The speaker is invited to give more background at the beginning of the discussion, and everyone is encouraged throughout to interrupt and ask questions of the form "What is?".
If need is, e.g. if the discussion becomes too cryptic and only comprehensible for few people, a democrator is nominated by the organizers: this participant is expressly asked to interrupt the discussion, even in a pedantic way, whenever they do not understand what is going on.
Participants are invited to choose a topic which is broadly related to topology. The selected question should give rise to a general discussion: it should be interesting and challenging to the speaker (so not something they already know the answer to), and it should not rely on too deep a knowledge of the subject. Ideally, some progress on the question should be doable in 55 minutes.
Independently of the outcome, and in particular independently of the success or failure to answer the selected question, ice-cream is served at the end of the seminar.
The hope is to provide a fun and relaxed space for topologists to get to know each other mathematically by gaining some hands-on exposure to the various interpretations of "topology" represented in the institute.
Everyone who has some interest in fields broadly related to topology, and in particular graduate students and early/mid-career researchers, are encouraged to join. We expect the seminar to be also an opportunity also to learn basic facts.
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