We began with an afternoon of brainstorming ideas about what...

We began with an afternoon of brainstorming ideas about what we wanted the conference to address. We let these ideas sit for a couple weeks and continued e-mailing comments over the e-mail list-serve before meeting again and narrowing down our brainstormed themes, cutting and pasting different ideas in different ways until we finally came to a theme we liked. There was a lot of debating and melding of ideas.