"Paul is still active in Limba, and I called him to discuss which speakers we'd have this year.
Being a sound designer involves lots of 'spade work, technical stuff like deciding which speakers go where,' he says.
The auditions, which authors pay to attend, help programmers gauge which speakers may be right for their audience.
The dialogues do not follow the Platonic, or dialectic, pattern but the Aristotelian, in which speakers expounded already formed opinions at greater length.
On one side of the room is a slot through which speakers of Chinese may insert questions or other messages in Chinese, and on the other is a slot through which the person in the room may issue replies.
So schools have encouraged girls to be bold through initiatives such as devising a maths test that is impossible to get all right and holding a failure week in which speakers show that it is possible to overcome setbacks.
As indicative as anything of the nature of Resonate was the frequency with which speakers began talks with gambits like: "I'm not really sure how to introduce myself, because my work kind of...falls in between categories".
She is appalled by the move towards "no platforming", in which speakers who have views deemed by students to be controversial or offensive, from Germaine Greer to Peter Tatchell, have been barred or disinvited from speaking events.
Aptly for the former host of The Apprentice, it was a reality TV show in which speakers tried outdo each other with outrageous behaviour as if to make tomorrow's tabloid front pages.
Last month at another conference in Washington, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (islam-democracy.org), presented another symposium, "Why Democracy and Why Now?" at which speakers attempted to map out liberal political views consistent with Islamic belief.
Perhaps Europe, with all its divisions, may eventually have a single foreign policy, a single immigration policy, a single transnational sovereignty and one set of ideas to which speakers of 21 languages will pledge allegiance.
